
Glass _B^^^- 
Book ■/)75' „ 






ST. PAUL & PROTESTANTISM 



"We often read the Scripture without comprehending its full 
meaning ; however, let us not be discouraged. The light, in God's 
good time, will break out, and disperse the darkness ; and we shall 
see the mysteries of the Gospel." 

Bishop Wilson. 

' ' With them (the Puritans) nothing is more familiar than to 
plead in their causes the Lazu of God, the Word of the Lord ; who 
notwithstanding, when they come to allege what word and what 
law they mean, their common ordinary practice is to quote ' by- 
speeches, and to urge them as if they were written in most exact 
form of law. What is to add to the Law of God if this be not ? " 

Hooker. 

" It will be found at last, that unity, and the peace of the 
Church, will conduce more to the saving of souls, than the most 
specious sects, varnished with the most pious, specious pretences." 

Bishop Wilson. 



ST. PAUL 



AND 



PROTESTANTISM 

WITH AN ESSAY ON PURITANISM AND 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 

FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 
AND FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE 



V 



THIRD EDITION 



■'O- 




LONDON 
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 

■1875 



{'f/ie right of ti-ansintioii is reserved) 



0-- 

A 

Jo 



! 



PREFACE. 

(1870.) 

The essay following the treatise on St. Paul and Pro- 
testantism, was meant to clear away offence or mismider- 
standing which had arisen out of that treatise. There 
still remain one or two points on which a word of ex- 
planation may be useful, and to them this preface is 
addressed. 

The general objection, that the scheme of doctrine 
criticised by me is common to both Puritanism and the 
Church of England, and does not characterise the one 
more essentially than the other, has been removed, I hope, 
by the concluding essay. But it is said that there is, at 
any rate, a large party in the Church of England, — the 
so-called Evangelical ^diXty, — which holds just the scheme 
of doctrine I have called Puritan ; that this large party, 
at least, if not the whole Church of England, is as much 



vi Preface. 

a stronghold of the distinctive Puritan tenets as the Non- 
conformists are ; and that to tax the Nonconformists with 
these tenets, and to say nothing about the EvangeUcal 
clergy holding them too, is injurious and unfair. 

The Evangelical party in the Church of England we 
must always, certainly, have a disposition to treat with 
forbearance, inasmuch as this party has so strongly loved 
what is indeed the most loveable of things, — religion. 
They have also avoided that unblessed mixture of politics 
and religion by which both politics and religion are spoilt. 
This, however, would not alone have prevented our 
making them jointly answerable with the Puritans for that 
body of opinions which calls itself Scriptural Protestan- 
tism, but which is, in truth, a perversion of St. Paul's 
Epistle to the Romans. But there is this difference be- 
tween the Evangelical party in the Church of England 
and the Puritans outside her ; — the Evangelicals have 
not added to the first error of holding this unsound body 
of opinions, the second error of separating for them. 
They have thus, as we have already noticed, escaped the 
mixing of politics and religion, which arises directly and 
naturally out of this separating for opinions. But they 
have also done that which we most blame Nonconformity 
for not doing ; — they have left themselves in the way of 
development. Practically they have admitted that the 



Preface. vii 

Christian Church is built, not on the foundation of 
Lutheran and Calvinist dogmas, but on the foundation : 
Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from 
iniquity} Mr. Ryle or the Dean of Ripon may have as 
erroneous notions as to what truth and the gospel really 
is, as Mr. Spurgeon or the President of the Wesleyan 
Conference ; but they do not tie themselves tighter still 
to these erroneous notions, nor do their best to cut them- 
selves off from outgrowing them, by resolving to have no 
fellowship with the man of sin who holds different notions. 
On the contrary, they are worshippers in the same Church, 
professors of the same faith, ministers of the same con- 
fraternity, as men Avho hold that their Scriptural Pro- 
testantism is all wrong, and who hold other notions of 
their own quite at variance with it And thus they do 
homage to an ideal of Christianity which is larger, higher, 
and better than either their notions or those of their op- 
ponents, and in respect of which both their notions and 
those of their opponents are inadequate ; and this admis- 
sion of the relative inadequacy of their notions is itself a 
stage towards the future admission of their positive inade- 
quacy. 

In fact, the popular Protestant theology, which we 

^ II Timothy, ii, 19. 



viii Pi'eface. 

have criticised as such a grave perversion of the teaching 
of St. Paul, has not in the so-called Evangelical party of 
the Church of England its chief centre and stronghold. 
This party, which, following in the wake of Wesley and 
others, so felt in a day of general insensibility the power 
and comfort of the Christian religion, and which did so 
much to make others feel them, but which also adopted 
and promulgated a scientific account so inadequate and 
so misleading of the religion which attracted it, — this 
great party has done its work, and is now undergoing that 
law of transformation and development which obtains in 
a national Church. The power is passing from it to others, 
who will make good some of the aspects of religion which 
the Evangelicals neglected, and who will then, in their 
turn, from the same cause of the scientific inadequacy of 
their conception of Christianity, change and pass away. 
The EvangeHcal clergy no longer recruits itself with suc- 
cess, no longer lays hold on such promising subjects as 
formerly. It is losing the future and feels that it is losing 
it. Its signs of a vigorous life, its gaiety and audacity, 
are confined to its older members, too powerful to lose 
their own vigour, but without successors to whom to 
transmit it. It was impossible not to admire the genuine 
and rich though somewhat brutal humour of the Dean of 



Preface. ix 

Ripon's famous similitude of the two lepers.^ But from 
which of the younger members of the EvangeHcal clergy 
do such strokes now come? The best of their own 
younger generation, the soldiers of their own training, are 
slipping away from them ; and he who looks for the 
source whence popular Puritan theology now derives 
power and perpetuation, mil not fix his eyes on the 
Evangelical clergy of the Church of England. 

Another point where a word of explanation seems 
desirable is the objection taken on a kind of personal 
ground to the criticism of St. Paul's doctrine which we 
have attempted. ' What ! ' it is said, ' if this view of St. 
Paul's meaning, so unlike the received view, were the 
true one, do you suppose it would have been left for you 
to discover it ? Are you ^^'iser than the hundreds of learned 
people who for generation after generation have been 
occupying themselves mth St. Paul and little else? Has 
it been left for you to bring in a new religion and found 

^ In a letter to the Times respecting Dr. Pusey and Dr. Temple, 
during the discussion caused by Dr. Temple's appointment to the 
see of Exeter. Dr. Temple was the total leper, so evidently a leper 
that all men would instinctively avoid him, and he ceased to be 
dangerous ; Dr. Pusey was the partial leper, less deeply tainted, but 
on tliat very account more dangerous, because less likely to terrify 
people from coming near him. A piece of polemical humour, racy, 
indeed, but hardly urbane, and still less Christian ! 



X Preface. 

a new church ? ' Now on this Hne of expostulation, which, 
so far as it draws from unworthiness of ours its argument, 
appears to have, no doubt, great force, there are three 
remarks to be offered. In the first place, even if the 
version of St. Paul which we propound were both new 
and true, yet we do not, on that account, make of it a new 
religion or set up a new church for its sake. That would 
be separating for opinions^ heresy, which is just what we 
reproach the Nonconformists with. In the seventh cen- 
tury, there arose near the Euphrates a sect called 
Paulicians, who professed to form themselves on the pure 
doctrine of St. Paul, which, other Christians, they said, 
had misunderstood and corrupted. And we, I suppose, 
having discovered how popular Protestantism perverts St. 
Paul, are expected to try and make a new sect of Pauli- 
cians on the strength of this discovery ; such being just 
the course which our Puritan friends would themselves 
eagerly take in like case. But the Christian Church is 
founded, not on a correct speculative knowledge of the 
ideas of Paul, but on the much surer ground : Let every 
07ie that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity ; 
and, holding this to be so, we might change the current 
strain of doctrinal theology from one end to the other, 
without, on that account, setting up any new church or 
bringing in any new religion. 



Preface. xl 

In the second place, the version we propound of St. 
Paul's line of thought is not new, is not of our discover- 
ing. It belongs to the ' Zeit-Geist,' or time-spi7'it, it is in 
the air, and many have long been anticipating it, prepa- 
ring it, setting forth this and that part of it, till there is 
not a part, probably, of all we have said, which has not 
already been said by others before us, and said more 
learnedly and fully than we can say it. All we have done 
is to take it as a whole, and give a plain, popular, con- 
nected exposition of it ; for which, perhaps, our notions 
about culture, about the many sides to the human spirit, 
about making these sides help one another instead of re- 
maining enemies and strangers, have been of some advan- 
tage. For most of those who read St. Paul diligently are 
Hebraisers ; they regard little except the Hebraising 
impulse in us and the documents which concern it. They 
have httle notion of letting their consciousness play on 
things freely, little ear for the voice of the ' Zeit-Geist; ' and 
they are so immersed in an order of thoughts and words 
which are peculiar, that, in the broad general order of 
thoughts and words, which is the life of popular exposi- 
tion, they are not very much at home. 

Thirdly, and in the last place, we by no means put 
forth our version of St. Paul's line of thought as true, in 
the same fashion as Puritanism put forth its Scriptural 



xii Preface. 

Protestantism, or gospel, as true. Their truth the Puritans 
exhibit as a sort of cast-iron product, rigid, definite, and 
complete, which they have got once for all, and which 
can no longer have anything added to it or anything 
withdrawn from it. But of our rendering of St. Paul's 
thought we conceive rather as of a product of nature, 
which has grown to be what it is and which will grow 
more ; which will not stand just as we now exhibit 
it, but which will gain some aspects which we now 
fail to show in it, and will drop some which we now 
give it ; which will be developed, in short, farther, just 
in like manner as it has reached its present stage by de- 
velopment. 

Thus we present our conceptions, neither as some- 
thing quite new nor as something quite true ; nor yet as 
any ground, even supposing they were quite new and 
true, for a separate church or religion. But so far they 
are, we think, new and true, and a fruit of sound develop- 
ment, a genuine ■ product of the 'Zeit-Geist,' that their 
mere contact seems to make the old Puritan conceptions 
look unHkely and indefensible, and begin a sort of re- 
modelling and refacing of themselves. Let us just see 
how far this change has practically gone. 

The formal and scholastic version of its theology, 
Calvinist or Arminian, as given by its seventeenth-century 



Preface. xiii 

fathers, and enshrined in the trust-deeds of so many of 
its chapels,~of this, at any rate, modern Puritanism is 
beginning to feel shy. Take the Calvinist doctrine of 
election. ' By God's decree a certain number of angels 
and men are predestinated, out of God's mere free grace 
and love, without any foresight of faith or good works in 
them, to everlasting life ; and others foreordained, ac- 
cording to the unsearchable counsel of his will, whereby 
he extends or withholds mercy as he pleases, to everlast- 
ing death.' In that scientific form, at least, the doctrine 
of election begins to look dubious to the Calvinistic 
Puritan, and he puts it a good deal out of sight.. Take 
the Arminian doctrine of justification. ' We could not 
expect any relief from heaven out of that misery under 
which we lie, were not God's displeasure against us first 
pacified and our sins remitted. This is the signal and 
transcendent benefit of our free justification through the 
blood of Christ, that God's offence justly conceived 
against us for our sins (which would have been an 
eternal bar and restraint to the efilux of his grace upon 
us) being removed, the divine grace and bounty may 
freely flow forth upon us.' In that scientific form, the 
doctrine of justification begins to look less satisfactory 
to the Arminian Puritan, and he tends to put it out of 
sight. 






xiv Preface. 

The same may be said of the doctrine of election in 
its plain popular form of statement also. ' I hold,' 
says Whitefield, in the forcible style which so took his 
hearers' fancy, — 'I hold that a certain number are elected 
from eternity, and these must and shall be saved, and 
the rest of mankind must and shall be damned/ A Cal- 
vinistic Puritan now-a-days must be either a fervid Welsh 
Dissenter, or a strenuous Particular Baptist in some re- 
mote place in the country, not to be a little staggered at 
this sort of expression. As to the doctrine of justifica- 
tion in its current, popular form of statement, the case is 
somewhat different. ' My own works,' says Wesley, ' my 
own sufferings, my own righteousness, are so far from 
reconciling me to an offended God, so far from making 
any atonement for the least of those sins which are more 
in number than the hairs of my head, that the most 
specious of them need an atonement themselves ; that, 
having the sentence of death in my heart and nothing 
in or of myself to plead, I have no hope but that of 
being justified freely through the redemption that is in 
Jesus. The faith I want is a sure trust and confidence 
in God, that through the merits of Christ my sins are 
forgiven and I reconciled to the favour of God. Believe 
and thou shalt be saved ! He that believeth is passed 
from death to life. Faith is the free gift of God, which 



Preface. xv 

he bestows not on those who are worthy of his favour, 
not on such as are previously holy and so fit to be 
crowned with all the blessings of his goodness, but on 
the ungodly and unholy, who till that hour were fit only 
for everlasting damnation. Look for sanctification just 
as you are, as a poor sinner that has nothing to pay, 
nothing to plead but Christ died? Deliverances of this 
sort, which in Wesley are frequent and in Wesley's 
followers are unceasing, still, no doubt, pass current 
everywhere with Puritanism, are expected as of course, 
and find favour j they are just what Puritans commonly 
mean by Scriphii'al Protestantism^ the truth, the gospel-feast. 
Nevertheless they no longer quite satisfy; the better 
minds among Puritans try instinctively to give some 
fresh turn or development to them ; they are no longer, 
to minds of this order, an unquestionable word and a 
sure stay ; and from this point to their final transforma- 
tion the course is certain. The predestinarian and 
solifidian dogmas, for the very sake of which our Puritan 
churches came into existence, begin to feel the irre- 
sistible breath of the ' Zeit-Geist ; ' some of them melt 
quicker, others slower, but all of them are doomed. 
Under the eyes of this generation Puritan Dissent has 
to execute an entire change of front, and to present 



xvi Preface. 

us with a new reason for its existing. What will that new 
reason be ? 

There needs no conjuror to tell us. It will be the 
Rev. Mr. Conder's reason, which we have quoted in our 
concluding essay. It will be Scriptural Protestantism in 
church-order^ rather than Scriptural Protestantism in 
chit7'ch-doctri7ie. ' Congregational Nonconfomiists can 
never be incorporated into an organic union with Anglican 
Episcopacy, because there is not even the shadow of an 
outline of it in the New Testament, and it is our asser- 
tion and profound belief that Christ and the Apostles 
have given us all the laws that are necessary for the 
constitution and government of the Church.' This 
makes church-government not a secondary matter of 
form, growth, and expediency, but a matter of the essence 
of Christianity and ordained in Scripture. Expressly set 
forth in Scripture it is not ; so it has to be gathered from 
Scripture by collection, and every one gathers it in his 
own way. Unity is of no great importance ; but that 
every man should live in a church-order which he judges 
to be scriptural, is of the greatest importance. This 
brings us to Mr. Miall's standard-maxim : The Dissi- 
dencc of Dissent^ and the Protestantism of the Protestant 
i-eligion I The more freely the sects develop themselves, 
the better. The Church of England herself is but the 



Preface. xvii 

dominant sect; her pretensions to bring back the Dis- 
senters within her pale are offensive and ridiculous. What 
we ought to aim at is perfect equality, and that the other 
sects should balance her. 

On the old, old subject of the want of historic and 
philosophic sense shown by those who would make 
church-government a matter of scriptural regulation, I 
say nothing at present. A Wesleyan minister, the Rev. 
Mr. Willey, said the other day at Leeds : ' He did not 
find anything in either the Old or New Testament to the 
effect that Christian ministers should become State-ser 
vants, like soldiers or excisemen.' He might as well 
have added that he did not find there anything to the 
effect that they should wear braces ! But on this point I 
am not here going to enlarge. What I am now concerned 
with is the relation of this new ground of existence, which 
more and more the Puritan Churches take and will take 
as they lose their old ground, to the Christian religion. 
In the speech which Mr. Winterbotham ^ made on the 
Education Bill, a speech which I had the advantage of 
hearing, there were uncommon facilities supplied for 

^ Mr. Winterbotham has since died. Nothing in my remarks on. 
his speech need prevent me from expressing here my high esteem 
for his character, accomplishments, oratorical faculty and general 
promise, and my sincere regret for his loss, 
a 2 



xviii Preface. 

judging of this relation ; indeed that able speech pre- 
sented a striking picture of it. 

And what a picture it was, good heavens ! The 
Puritans say they love righteousness, and they are offended 
with us for rejoining that the righteousness of which 
they boast is the righteousness of the earlier Jews of the 
Old Testament, which consisted mainly in smiting the 
Lord's enemies and their own under the fifth rib. And 
we say that the newer and specially Christian sort of 
righteousness is something different from this ; that the 
Puritans are, and always have been, deficient in the 
specially Christian sort of righteousness ; that men like 
St. Francis of Sales, in the Roman CathoHc Church, and 
Bishop Wilson, in the Church of England, show far more 
of it than any Puritans ; and that St. Paul's signal and 
eternally fruitful growth in righteousness dates just from 
his breach with the Puritans of his day. Let us revert 
to Paul's list of fruits of the spirit, on which we have so 
often insisted in the pages which follow : love, joy, peace, 
long-siiffermg, kindness, goodness, faith, mildness, self- 
control} We keep to this particular list for the sake of 
greater distinctness ; but St. Paul has perpetually lists 
of the kind, all pointing the same way, and all showing 
what he meant by Christian righteousness, what he found 
specially in Christ. They may all be concluded in two 
1 Gal, V, 22, 23. 



Preface. xix 

qualities, the qualities which Jesus Christ told his dis- 
ciples to learn of him, the qualities in the name of which, 
as specially Christ's qualities, Paul adjured his converts. 
' Learn of me,' said Jesus, ' that I am mild and lozuly 
in heart' 'I beseech you,' said Paul, 'hy the mildness 
and gentleness of Christ ^^ The word which our Bibles 
translate by ' gentleness ' means more properly ' reason- 
ableness with sweetness,' 'sweet reasonableness.' 'I 
beseech you by the mildness and szveet 7'easonahle.ness 
of Christ.'' This mildness and sweet reasonableness 
it was, which, stamped with the individual charm they 
had in Jesus Christ, came to the world as something new, 
w^on its heart and conquered it. Every one had been 
asserting his ordinary self and Avas miserable ; to 
forbear to assert one's ordinaiy self, to place one's 
happiness in mildness and sweet reasonableness, was a 
revelation. As men followed this novel route to hap- 
piness, a living spring opened beside their way, the 
spring of charity ; and out of this spring arose those two 
heavenly visitants, Charis and Irene, grace and peace, 
which enraptured the poor wayfarer, and filled him with 
a joy which brought all the world after him. And still, 
whenever these visitants appear, as appear for a witness 
to the vitality of Christianity they daily do, it is from the 

^ 5ia T^s TfpavrriTOS Kol ivLeiKdas rod Xpicrrov. II Cor., x, i. 



XX Preface. 

same spring that they arise ; and this spring is opened 
solely by the mildness and sweet reasonableness which 
forbears to assert our ordinary self, nay, which even takes 
pleasure in effacing it. 

And now let us turn to Mr. Winterbotham and the 
Protestant Dissenters. He interprets their very inner 
mind, he says ; that which he declares in their name, they 
are all feeling, and would declare for themselves if they 
could. ' There was a spirit of watchful jealousy on the 
J)a?'t of the Dissenters^ which made tJicm prone to take 
offe7tce; therefore statesmen should not introduce the Esta- 
blished ChurcJi into all the institutions of the country.' That 
is positively the whole speech ! 'Strife, jealousy, wi'ath,. 
contentions, backbitings,' ^ — we know the catalogue. And 
the Dissenters are, by their own confession, so full of 
these, and the very existence of an organisation of Dis- 
sent so makes them a necessity, that the State is required 
to frame its legislation in consideration of them ! Was 
there ever such a confession made ? Here are people 
existing for the sake of a religion of which the essence is 
mildness and sweet reasonableness, and the forbearing to 
assert our ordinary self ; and they declare themselves so 
full of the very temper and habits against which that re- 
ligion is specially levelled, that they require to have even 

^ II Cor.^ xii, 20. 



Preface. xxi 

the occasion of forbearing to assert their ordinary self 
removed out of their way, because they are quite sure they 
will never comply with it ! 

Never was there a more instructive comment on the 
blessings of separation, which we are so often invited by 
separatists to admire. Why does not Dissent forbear to 
assert its ordinary self, and help to win the world to the 
mildness and sweet reasonableness of Christ, without 
this vain contest about machinery? Why does not the 
Church ? is the Dissenter's answer. What an answer for 
a Christian ! We are to defer giving up our ordinary self 
until our neighbour shall have given up his ; that is, we 
are never to give it up at all. But I will answer the 
question on more mundane grounds. Why are we to be 
more blamed than the Church for the strife arising out of 
our rival existences? asks the Dissenter. Because the 
Church cannot help existing, and you can ! Therefore, 
contra ecclesiam nemo pacificiis^ as Baxter himself said in 
his better moments. Because the Church is there j 
because strife, jealousy, and self-assertion are sure to 
come with breaking off from her; and because strife, 
jealousy, and self-assertion are the very miseries against 
which Christianity is firstly levelled j — therefore we say 
that a Christian is inexcusable in breaking with the 
Church, except for a departure from the primal ground 



xxii Preface. 

of her foundation : Let every one that nameth the name 
of Christ depart from iniquity. 

The clergyman, — poor soul ! — cannot help being the 
parson of the parish. He is there like the magistrate ; 
he is a national officer with an appointed function. If 
one or two voluntary performers, dissatisfied with the 
magisterial system, were to set themselves up in each 
parish of the country, called themselves magistrates, drew 
a certain number of people to their own way of thinking, 
tried differences and gave sentences among their people 
in the best fashion they could, why, probably the esta- 
blished magistrate would not much like it, the leading 
people in the parish would not much like it, and the new- 
comers would have mortifications and social estrange- 
ments to endure. Probably the established magistrate 
would call them interlopers; probably he would count 
them amongst his difficulties. On the side of the new- 
comers 'a spirit of watchful jealousy,' as Mr. Winterbotham 
says, would thus be created. The public interest would 
suffer from the ill blood and confusion prevailing. The 
established magistrate might naturally say that the new- 
comers brought the strife and disturbance with them. 
But who would not smile at these lambs answering : ' Away 
with that v/olf the established magistrate, and all ground 
for jealousy and quarrel between us will disappear ! ' 



Preface. xxiii 

■ And it is a grievance that the clergyman talks of 
Dissent as one of the spiritual hindrances in his parish, 
and desires to get rid of it ! Why, by Mr. Winter- 
botham's own showing, the Dissenters live ' in a spirit 
of watchful jealousy,' and this temper is as much a 
spiritual hindrance, — nay, in the view of Christianity it 
is even a more direct spiritual hindrance, — than drunken- 
ness or loose living. Christianity is, first and above all, 
a temper, a disposition ; and a disposition just the op- 
posite to 'a spirit of watchful jealousy.' Once admit 
a spirit of watchful jealousy, and Christianity has lost 
its virtue ; it is impotent. All the other vices it was ' 
meant to keep out may rush in. Where there is jealousy 
and strife among you, asks St. Paul, are ye not carnal? ^ 
are ye not still in bondage to your mere lower selves ? 
But from this bondage Christianity was meant to free us ; 
therefore, says he, get rid of what causes divisions, and 
strife, and ' a spirit of watchful jealousy.' ' I exhort you 
by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ that ye all speak 
the same thing, and that there be not divisions among 
you, but that ye all be perfectly joined in the same mind 
and the same judgment.' ^ 

Well, but why, says the Dissenting minister, is the 
clergyman to impress St. Paul's words upon me rather 
* I Cor., iii, 3. - i Cor., i, 10. 



xxiv Preface. 

than I upon the clergyman ? Because the clergyman is 
the one minister of Christ in the parish who did not in- 
vent himself, who cannot help existing. He is not assert- 
ing his ordinary self by being there ; he is placed there 
on public duty. He is charged with teaching the lesson 
of Christianity, and the head and front of this lesson is to 
get rid of ' a spirit of watchful jealousy,' which, according 
to the Dissenter's own showing, is the very spirit which 
accompanies Dissent. How he is to get rid of it, how he 
is to win souls to the mildness and sweet reasonableness 
of Christ, It is for his own conscience to tell him. Pro- 
bably he will best do it by never speaking against Dissent 
at all, by treating Dissenters with perfect cordiality and 
as if there was not a point of dispute between them. 
But that, so long as he exists, it is his duty to get rid of 
it, to win souls to the unity which is its opposite, is clear. 
It is not the Bishop of Winchester * who classes Dissent, 
full of ' a spirit of watchful jealousy,' along with spiritual 
hindrances like beer-shops, — a pollution of the spirit along 
with pollutions of the flesh ; ^ it is St. Paul. It is not the 
clergyman who is chargeable with wishing to ' stamp out ^ 
this spirit ; it is the Christian religion. 

But what is to prevent the Dissenting minister from 

1 The late Bishop Wilberforce. ^ j Qqj.^^ yii^ i. 



Preface. xxv 

being joined with the clergyman in the same pubhc fmic- 
tion, and being his partner instead of his rival ? Episco- 
pal ordination.^ If I leave the service of a private com- 
pany, and enter the public service, I receive admission at 
the hands of the public officer designated to give it me. 
Sentiment and the historic sense, to say nothing of the 
religious feeUng, will certainly put more into ordination 
than this, though not precisely what the Bishop of Win- 
chester, perhaps, puts ; this which we have laid down, 
however, is really all which the law of the land puts there. 
A bishop is a public officer. Why should I trouble my- 
self about the name his office bears ? The name of his 
office cannot affect the service or my labour in it. Ah, 
but, says Mr. Winterbotham, he holds opinions which I 
do not share about the sort of character he confers upon 
me ! What can that matter, unless he compels you, too, 
to profess the same opinions, or refuses you admission 
if you do not? But I should be joined in the ministry 

^ It has been inferred from what is here said that we propose 
to make re-ordination a condition of admitting Dissenting ministers 
to the ministry of the Chm*ch of England. Elsewhere I have said 
how undesirable it seems to impose this condition ; and to what 
respectful treatment and fair and equal terms, in case of reunion, Pro- 
testant Nonconformity is, in my opinion, entitled. See the Preface 
to Culture and Anarchy. What is said in the text is directed simply 
against the objection to episcopal ordination as something wrong in 
itself and a ground for schism. 



xxvi Preface. 

with men who hold opinions which I do not share ! What 
does that matter either, unless they compel you also to 
hold these opinions, as the price of your being allowed to 
work on the foundation : Let every one that nameth the 
name of Christ depart from iniquity ? To recur to our 
old parallel. It is as if a man who desired the offite of a 
public magistrate and who was fitted for it, were to hold 
off because he had to receive institution from a Lord- 
Lieutenant, and he did not like the title of Lord- Lieu- 
tenant ; or because the Lord-Lieutenant who was to in- 
stitute him 'had a fancy about some occult quafity which 
he conferred on him at institution -, or because he would 
find himself, when he was instituted, one of a body of 
magistrates of whom many had notions which he thought 
irrational. The office itself, and his own power to fill it 
usefully, is all which really matters to him. 

The Bishop of Winchester believes in apostolical 
succession ; — therefore there must be Dissenters. Mr. 
Liddon asserts the real presence ; — therefore there must 
be Dissenters. Mr. Mackonochie is a ritualist ; — there- 
fore there must be Dissenters. But the Bishop of Win- 
chester cannot, and does not, exclude from the ministry 
of the Church of England those who do not believe in 
apostolical succession ; and surely not even that acute 
and accomplished personage is such a magician, that he 



Preface. xxvii 

can make a Puritan believe in apostolical succession 
merely by believing in it himself ! In the same way,, 
eloquent as is Mr. Liddon, and devoted as is Mr. Mac- 
konochie, their gifts cannot yield them the art of sa 
swaying a brother clergyman's spirit as to make him 
admit the real presence against his conviction, or practise 
ritualism against his ^vill j and official, material control 
over him, or power of stipulating what he shall admit or 
practise, they have absolutely none. 

But can anything more tend to make the Church what 
the Puritans reproach it with being, — a mere lump of 
sacerdotalism and ritualism, — than if the Puritans, who 
are free to come into it with their disregard of sacerdotal- 
ism and ritualism and so to leaven it, refuse to come in, 
and leave it wholly to the sacerdotalists and rituaHsts ? 
What can be harder upon the laity of the national Church, 
what so inconsiderate of the national good and advan- 
tage, as to leave us at the mercy of one single element 
in the Church, and deny us just the elements fit to ftiix 
with this element and to improve it ? 

The current doctrines of apostolical succession and 
the real presence seem to us unsound and un edifying. 
To be sure, so does the current doctrine of imputed 
righteousness. For us, sacerdotalism and solifidianism 
stand both on the same footing ; they are, both of them, 
eiToneous human developments. But as in the ideas and 



xxviii Preface, 

practice of sacerdotalists or ritualists there is much which 
seems to us of vahie, and of great use to the Church, so, 
too, in the ideas and practice of Nonconformists there is 
very much which we vahie. To take points only that are 
beyond controversy : they have cultivated the gift of 
preaching much more than the clergy, and their union 
with the Church would renovate and immensely amend 
Church preaching. They would certainly bring with 
them, if they came back into the Church, some use of 
what they call free prayer ; to which, if at present they 
give far too much place, it is yet to be regretted that the 
Church gives no place at all. Lastly, if the body of 
British Protestant Dissenters is in the main, as it un- 
doubtedly is, the Church of the Philistines, nevertheless 
there could come nothing but health and strength from 
blending this body with the Establishment, of which the 
very weakness and danger is that it tends, as we have 
formerly said, to be an appendage to the Barbarians. 

So long as the Puritans thought that the essence of 
Christianity was their doctrine of predestination or of 
justification, it was natural that they should stand out, at 
any cost, for this essence. That is why, when the ' Zeit- 
Oeist ' and the general movement of men's religious ideas 
is beginning to reveal that the Puritan gospel is not the 
essence of Christianity, we have been desirous to spread 



Preface. xxix 

this revelation to the best of our power, and by all the 
aids of plain popular exposition to help it forward. 
Because, when once it is clear that the essence of Christ- 
ianity is not Puritan solindianism, it can hardly long be 
maintained that the essence of Christianity is Puritan 
church-order. When once the way is made clear, by 
removing the solifidian heresy, to look and see what the 
essence of Christianity really is, it cannot but soon force 
itself upon our minds that the essence of Christianity is 
something not very far, at any rate, from this : Gi'ace and 
peace by the annulment of om- oi'dinary sef through the 
mildness and simet reasonahleness of fesus Christ. This 
is the more particular description of that general ground, 
-already laid down, of the Christian Church's existence : 
Let eveiy one that nameth the name of Christ depart from 
■iniquity. If this general ground, particularised in the 
way above given, is not ' the sincere milk ' of the evange- 
lical word, it is, at all events, something very Hke it. And 
matters of machinery and outward form, like church-order, 
have not only nothing essentially to do with the sincere 
milk of Christianity, but are the very matters about which 
•this sincere milk should make us easy and yielding. 

If there were no national and historic form of church- 
order in possession, a genuine Christian would regret 
having to spend time and thought in shaping one, in 



XXX Preface. 

having so to encumber himself with serving, to busy him- 
self so much about a frame for his religious life as well 
as about the contents of the frame. After all, a man has 
only a certain sum of force to spend ; and if he takes a 
quantity of it for outward things, he has so much the 
less left for inward things. It is hardly to be believed^ 
how much larger a space the mere affairs of his denomi- 
nation fill in the time and thoughts of a Dissenter, than 
in the time and thoughts of a Churchman. Now all 
machinery- work of this kind is, to a man filled with a 
real love of the essence of Christianity, something of a 
hindrance to him in what he most wants to be at, some- 
thing of a concession to his ordinary self. When an 
established and historic form exists, such a man should 
be, therefore, disposed to use it and comply with it. 
But, — as if it were not satisfied with proving its un- 
profitableness by corroding us with jealousy and so 
robbing us of the mildness and sweet reasonableness of 
Christ, which is our mainstay, — political Dissent, Dissent 
for the sake of church-polity and church-management, 
proves it, too, by stimulating our ordinary self through 
over-care for what flatters this. In fact, what is it that 
the everyday, middle-class Philistine, — not the rare 
flower of the Dissenters but the common staple, — finds 
so attractive in Dissent? Is it not, as to discipline, 



Preface. xxxi 

that his self-importance is fomented _by the fuss, bustle, 
and partisanship of a private sect, instead of being lost 
in the greatness of a public body ? As to worship, is it 
not that his taste is pleased by usages and words that 
come down to him, instead of drawing him up to them ; 
by services which reflect, instead of the culture of great 
men of religious genius, the crude culture of himself 
and his fellows ? And as to doctrine, is it not that his 
mind is pleased at hearing no opinion but its own, by 
having all disputed points taken for granted in its own 
favour, by being urged to no return upon itself, no 
development? And what is all this but the very 
feeding and stimulating of our ordinary self, instead 
of the annulling of it ? No doubt it is natural ; to 
indulge our ordinary self is the most natural thing in the 
world. But Christianity is not natural ; and if the 
flower of Christianity be the grace and peace which 
comes of annulling our ordinary self, then to this flower it 
is fatal. 

So that if, in order to gratify in the Dissenters one 
of the two faults against which Christianity is chiefly 
aimed, a jealous, contentious spirit, we were to sweep 
away our national and historic form of religion, and were 
all to tinker at our own forms, we should then just be 
flattering the other chief fault which Christianity came to 

b 



xxxii Preface. 

cure, and serving our ordinary self instead of annulling 
it. What a happy furtherance to religion ! 

For my part, so far as the best of the Nonconformist 
ministers are concerned, of whom I know something, I 
disbelieve Mr. Winterbotham's hideous confession. I 
imagine they are very little pleased with him for making 
it. I do not believe that they, at any rate, live in the 
ulcerated condition he describes, fretting with watchful 
jealousy. I believe they have other things to think of. 
But why? Because they are men of genius and cha- 
racter, who react against the harmful influences of the 
position in which they find themselves placed, and 
surmount its obvious dangers. But their genius and 
character might serve them still better if they were 
placed in a less trying position. And the rank and file 
of their ministers and people do yield to the influences 
of their position. Of these, Mr. Winterbotham's picture 
is perfectly true. They are more and more jealous for 
their separate organisation, pleased with the bustle and 
self-importance which its magnitude brings them, irri- 
tably alive to whatever reduces or effaces it ; bent, in 
short, on affirming their ordinary selves. However much 
the chiefs may feel the truth of modern ideas, may grow 
moderate, may perceive the effects of rehgious separatism 
upon worship and doctrine, they will probably avail 



Preface. xxxiii 

little or nothing ; the head will be overpowered and out- 
clamoured by the tail. The Wesleyans, who used always 
to refuse to call themselves Dissenters, whose best men 
still shrink from the name, the Wesleyans, a wing of the 
Church, founded for godliness, the Wesleyans more and 
more, with their very growth as a separate denomination, 
feel the secular ambition of being great as a denomina- 
tion, of being effaced by nobody, of giving contentment 
to this self-importance, of indulging this ordinary self; 
and I should not wonder if within twenty years they 
were keen political Dissenters. A triumph of Puri- 
tanism is abundantly possible ; we have never denied 
it. What we, whose greatest care is neither for the 
Church nor for Puritanism, but for human perfection, 
what we labour to show is, that the triumph of Puri- 
tanism will be the triumph of our ordinary self, not the 
triumph of Christianity ; and that the type of Hebraism 
it will establish is one in which neither general human 
perfection, nor yet Hebraism itself, can truly find their 
account. 

Elsewhere we have drawn out a distinction between 

Hebraism and Hellenism,^ — between the tendency and 

powers that carry us towards doing, and the tendency 

and powers that carry us towards perceiving and knowing. 

^ See Culture and AnmxJiy (2nd edition), chap. iv. 



xxxiv Preface. 

Hebraism, we said, has long been overwhelmingly pre- 
ponderant with us. The sacred book which we call the 
Word of God, and which most of us study far more 
than any other book, serves Hebraism. Moses Hebraises, 
David Hebraises, Isaiah Hebraises, Paul Hebraises, 
John Hebraises. Jesus Christ himself is, as St. Paul 
truly styles him, ' a minister of the circumcision to the 
truth of God.' ^ That is, it is by our powers of moral 
action, and through the perfecting of these, that Christ 
leads us ' to be partakers of the divine nature.' ^ By far 
our chief machinery for spiritual purposes has the like 
aim and character. Throughout Europe this is so. But, 
to speak of ourselves only, the Archbishop of Canterbury 
is an agent of Hebraism, the Archbishop of York is an 
agent of Hebraism, Archbishop Manning is an agent 
of Hebraism, the President of the Wesleyan Con- 
ference is an agent of Hebraism, all the body of the 
Church clergy and Dissenting ministers are agents of 
Hebraism. Now, we have seen how ^ve are beginning, 
visibly to suffer harm from attending in this one-sided 
way to Hebraism, and how we are called to develop 
ourselves more in our totality, on our perceptive and 
intelligential side as well as on our moral side. If it is 
said that this is a very hard matter, and that man cannot 
1 Romans, xv, 8. - II Peter, i, 4. 



Preface, xxxv 

well do more than one thing at a time, the answer is that 
here is the very sign and condition of each new stage of 
spiritual progress,— /;2f;r<2j'^ of task. The more we grow, 
the greater is the task which is given us. This is the law 
of man's nature and of his spirit's history. The powers 
we have developed at our old task enable us to attempt 
a new one ; and this, again, brings with it a new increase 
of powers. 

Hebraism strikes too exclusively upon one string in 
us. Hellenism does not address itself with serious energy 
enough to morals and righteousness. For our totality^ 
for our general perfection, we need to unite the two ; 
now the two are easily at variance. In their lower forms 
they are irreconcileably at variance ; only when each of 
them is at its best, is their harmony possible. Hebraism 
at its best is beauty and charm ; Hellenism at its best is. 
also beauty and charm. As such they can unite; as. 
anything short of this, each of them, they are at discord^ 
and their separation must continue. The flower of 
Hellenism is a kind of amiable grace and artless win- 
ning good-nature, born out of the perfection of lucidity, 
simplicity, and natural truth ; the flower of Christianity 
is grace and peace by the annulment of our ordinary self 
through the mildness and sweet reasonableness of Christ. 
Both are eminently humane^ and for complete human per- 



xxxvi Preface. 

fection both are required; the second being the perfec- 
tion of that side in us which is moral and acts, the first, 
of that side in us which is intelHgential andperceives and 
knows. 

But lower forms of Hebraism and Hellenism tend 
always to make their appearance, and to strive to establish 
themselves. On one of these forms of Hebraism we have 
been commenting ; — a form which had its first origin, no 
doubt, in that body of impulses whereby we Hebraise, 
but which lands us at last, not in the mildness and sweet 
reasonableness of Christ, but in 'a spirit of watchful 
jealousy.' We have to thank Mr. Winterbotham for 
fixing our attention on it ; but we prefer to name it from 
an eminent and able man who is well known as the earnest 
apostle of the Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestant- 
ism of the Protestant religion, and to call it Mialism. 
Mialism is a sub-form of Hebraism, and itself a some- 
what spurious and degenerated form ; but this sub-form 
always tends to degenerate into forms lower yet, and yet 
more unworthy of the ideal flower of Hebraism. In one 
of these its further stages we have formerly traced it, and 
we need not enlarge on them here.^ 

Hellenism, in the same way, has its more or less 
spurious and degenerated sub-forms, products which may 
* See Culture and Anarchy (2ncl edition), chap. ii. 



Preface. xxxvii 

be at once known as degenerations by their deflexion 
from what we have marked as the flower of Hellenism, — 
* a kind of humane grace and artless winning good-nature, 
born out of the perfection of lucidity, simplicity, and 
natural truth.' And from whom can we more pro2:)erly 
derive a general name for these degenerations, than from 
that distinguished man, who, by his intelligence and 
accomplishments, is in many respects so admirable and so 
truly Hellenic, but whom his dislike for ' the dominant 
sect,' as he calls the Church of England, — the Church 
of England, in many aspects so beautiful, calming, and 
attaching, — seems to transport with an almost feminine 
vehemence of irritation ? What can we so fitly name the 
somewhat degenerated and inadequate form of Hellenism 
as Millism 2 This is the Hellenic or Hellenistic counter- 
part of Mialism; and like Mialism it has its further 
degenerations, in which it is still less commendable than 
in its first form. For instance, what in Mr. Mill is but a 
yielding to a spirit of irritable injustice, goes on and 
worsens in some of his disciples, till it becomes a sort 
of mere blatancy and truculent hardness in certain Mill- 
ites, in whom there appears scarcely anything that is 
truly sound or Hellenic at all. 

Mankind, however, must needs draw, however slowly, 
tOAvards its perfection; and our only real perfection is 



xxxviii Preface. 

our totality. Mialism and Millism we may see playing 
into one another's hands, and apparently acting together ; 
but, so long as these lower forms of Hellenism and Hebra- 
ism prevail, the real union between Hellenism and Hebra- 
ism can never be accomplished, and our totality is still as 
far off as ever. Unhappy and unquiet alternations of 
ascendency between Hebraism and Hellenism are all that 
we shall see ; — at one time, the indestructible religious ex- 
perience of mankind asserting itself blindly ; at another, a 
revulsion of the intellect of mankind from this experience, 
because of the audacious assumptions and gross inaccura- 
cies with which men's account of it is inteniiingled. 

At present it is such a revulsion which seems chiefly 
imminent. Give the churches of Nonconformity free 
scope, cries an ardent Congregationalist, and we will 
renew the wonders of the first times ; we will confront 
this modern bugbear of physical science, show how hollow 
she is, and how she contradicts herself ! In his mind's 
eye, this Nonconforming enthusiast already sees Professor 
Huxley in a white sheet, brought up at the Surrey Taber- 
nacle between two deacons, — whom that great physicist, 
in his own clear and nervous language, would no doubt 
describe like his disinterred Roman the other day at 
Westminster Abbey, as ' of weak mental organisation and 
strong muscular frame,' — and penitently confessing that 



Preface. xxxix 

Science contradicts herself. Alas, the real future is likely to 
be very different ! Rather are we likely to witness an 
edifying solemnity, where Mr. Mill, assisted by his youth- 
ful henchmen and apparitors, will burn all the Prayer 
Books. Rather will the time come, as it has been fore- 
told, when we shall desire to see one of the days of the 
Son of Man, and shall not see it ; when the mildness and 
sweet reasonableness of Jesus Christ, as a power to work 
the annulment of our ordinary self, will be clean disre- 
garded and out of mind. Then, perhaps, will come another 
re-action, and another, and another ; and all sterile. 

Therefore it is, that we labour to make Hebraism 
raise itself above Mialism, find its true self, show itself in 
its beauty and power, and help, not hinder, man's totality. 
The endeavour will very likely be in vain ; for growth is 
slow and the ages are long, and it may well be that for 
harmonising Hebraism with Hellenism more preparation is 
needed than man has yet had. But failures do something, as 
well as successes, towards the final achievement. The cup 
of cold water could be hardly more than an ineffective 
effort at succour; yet it counted. To disengage the religion 
of England from unscriptural Protestantism, political 
Dissent, and a spirit of watchful jealousy, may be an 
aim not in our day reachable ; and still it is well to level 
at it. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

St. Paul and Protestantism i 

Puritanism and the Church of England . . . 119 



ST. PAUL 



AND 



PROTESTANTISM 



ST. PAUL 

AND 

PROTESTANTISM, 



I. 

M. Renan sums up his interesting volume on St. Paul 
by saying : — ' After having been for three hundred 
years, thanks to Protestantism, the Christian doctor /^r 
excellence, Paul is now coming to an end of his reign.' 
All through his book M. Renan is possessed with a 
sense of this close relationship between St. Paul and 
Protestantism. Protestantism has made Paul, he says ; 
PauHne doctrine is identified with Protestant doctrine j 
Paul is a Protestant doctor, and the counterpart of 
Luther. M. Renan has a strong distaste for Protestantism, 
and this distaste extends itself to the Protestant Paul. 
The reign of this Protestant is now coming to an end, and 



4 SL Paul and Protestantism. 

such a consummation evidently has M. Renan's ap- 
proval. 

St. Paul is now coming to an end of his reign. Pre- 
cisely the contrary, I venture to think, is the judgment to 
which a true criticism of men and of things, in our own 
country at any rate, leads us. The Protestantism which 
has so used and abused St. Paul is coming to an end ; 
its organisations, strong and active as they look, are 
touched with the finger of death ; its fundamental ideas, 
sounding forth still every week from thousands of pulpits, 
have in them no significance and no power for the pro- 
gressive thought of humanity. But the reign of the real 
St Paul is only beginning ; his fundamental ideas, dis- 
engaged from the elaborate misconceptions with which 
Protestantism has overlaid them, will have an influence 
in the future greater than any which they have yet had, — 
an influence proportioned to their correspondence with 
a number of the deepest and most permanent facts of 
human nature itself 

Elsewhere * I have pointed out how, for us in this 
country, Puritanism is the strong and special representa- 
tive of Protestantism. The Church of England existed 
before Protestantism, and contains much besides Protes- 
tantism. Remove the schemes of doctrine, Calvinistic or 

' See Culture and Anarchy, chap. iv. 



St. Paul and Protestajttism. 5 

Arminian, which for Protestantism, merely as such, have 
made the very substance of its reHgion, and all that is 
most valuable in the Church of England would still re- 
main. These schemes, or the ideas out of which they 
spring, show themselves in the Prayer Book ; but they are 
not what gives the Prayer Book its importance and value. 
But Puritanism exists for the sake of these schemes ; its 
organisations are inventions for enforcing them more 
purely and thoroughly. Questions of discipline and cere- 
monies have, originally at least, been always admitted to 
be in themselves secondary ; it is because that conception 
of the ways of God to man which Puritanisni has formed 
for itself appeared to Puritanism superlatively true and 
precious, that Independents and Baptists and Methodists 
in England, and Presbyterians in Scotland, have been 
impelled to constitute for inculcating it a church-order 
where it might be less swamped by the additions and 
ceremonies of men, might be more simply and effec- 
tively enounced, and might stand more absolute and 
central, than in the church-order of Anglicans or Roman 
Catholics. 

Of that conception the cardinal points are fixed by 
the terms election and justification. These terms come 
from the writings of St. -Paul, and the scheme which 
Puritanism has constructed with them professes to be St. 



6 vS/. Paul and Protestantism. 

Paul's scheme. The same scheme, or something very 
hke it, has been, and still is, embraced by many adherents 
of the Churches of England and Rome ; but these 
Churches rest their claims to men's interest and attach- 
ment not on the possession of such a scheme, but on 
other grounds with which we have for the present nothing 
to do. Puritanism's very reason for existing depends on 
the worth of this its vital conception, derived from St. 
Paul's writings ; and when we are told that St. Paul is a 
Protestant doctor whose reign is ending, a Puritan, keen, 
pugnacious, and sophisticating simple religion of the 
heart into complicated theories of the brain about election 
and justification, we in England, at any rate, can best try 
the assertion by fixing our eyes on our own Puritans, and 
comparing their doctrine and their hold on vital truth 
with St. Paul's. 

This we propose now to do, and, indeed, to do it 
will only be to complete what we have already begun. 
For already, when we were speaking of Hebraism and 
Hellenism,^ we were led to remark how the over- 
Hebraising of Puritanism, and its want of a wide culture, 
do so narrow its range and impair its vision that even 
the documents which it thinks all-sufficient, and to the 
study of which it exclusively- rivets itself, it does not 
' See Culture and Anarchy^ chap. v. 



S^. Paul and Protestantism. 7 

rightly understand, but is apt to make of them some- 
thing quite different from what they really are. In short, 
no man, we said, who knows nothing else, knows even 
his Bible. And we showed how readers of the Bible 
attached to essential words and ideas of the Bible a 
sense which was not the writer's ; and in particular how 
this had happened with regard to the Pauline doctrine 
of resurrection. Let us take the present opportunity 
of going further in the same road ; and instead of 
lightly disparaging the great name of St. Paul, let us 
see if the needful thing is not rather to rescue St. 
Paul and the Bible from the perversions of them by mis- 
taken men. 

So long as the well-known habit, on which we have 
so often enlarged, prevails amongst our countrymen, of 
holding mechanically their ideas themselves, but making 
it their chief aim to work with energy and enthusiasm for 
the organisations which profess those ideas, English 
Puritanism is not likely to make such a return upon its 
own thoughts, and upon the elements of its being, as to 
accomplish for itself an operation of the kind needed ; 
though it has men whose natural faculties, were they but 
free to use them, would undoubtedly prove equal to the 
task. The same habit prevents our Puritans from being 
reached by philosophical works, which exist in sufficient 



8 S^. Paul and Protestantism. 

numbers and of which M, Reuss's history of the growth 
of Christian theology^ is an admirable specimen, — v/orks 
where the entire scheme of PauHne doctrine is laid out 
with careful research and impartial accuracy. To give 
effect to the predominant points in Paul's teaching, and 
to exhibit these in so plain and popular a manner as to 
invite and almost compel men's comprehension, is not 
the design of such works ; and only by writings with this 
design in view will English Puritanism be reached. 

Our one qualification for the business in hand lies in 
that belief of ours, so much contested by our country- 
men, of the primary needfulness of seeing things as they 
really are, and of the greater importance of ideas than of 
the machinery which exists for them. If by means of 
letting our consciousness work quite freely, and by fol- 
lowing the methods of studying and judging thence gene- 
rated, we are shown that we ought in real truth neither to 
abase St. Paul and Puritanism together, as M. Renan . 
does, nor to abase St. Paul but exalt Puritanism, nor yet 
to exalt both Puritanism and St. Paul together, but rather 
to abase Puritanism and exalt St. Paul, then we cannot 
but think that even for Puritanism itself, also, it will be , 

' Histoire de la Theologie Chretienne au Steele Apostolique, par 
Edouard Reuss ; Strasbourg et Paris (in 2 vols. 8vo.) There is 
now (1875) an English translation of M. Reuss's work. 



Sf. Paul and Protestantism. 9 

the best, however unpalatable, to be shown this. Puri- 
tanism certainly wishes well to St. Paul ; it cannot wish 
to compromise him by an unintelligent adhesion to him 
and a blind adoption of his words, instead of being a true 
child to him. Yet this is what it has really done. What 
in St. Paul is secondary and subordinate, Puritanism has 
made primary and essential ; what in St. Paul is figure 
and belongs to the sphere of feeling, Puritanism has 
transported into the sphere of intellect and made formula. 
On the other hand, what is with St. Paul primary, Puri- 
tanism has treated as subordinate : and what is with him 
thesis, and belonging (so far as anything in religion can 
properly be said thus to belong) to the sphere of intellect, 
Puritanism has made image and figure. 

And first let us premise what we mean in this matter 
by primary and secondary, essential and subordinate. 
We mean, so far as the apostle is concerned, a greater or 
less approach to what really characterises him and gives 
his teaching its originality and power. We mean, so 
far as truth is concerned, a greater or less agreement 
with facts which can be verified, and a greater or less 
power of explaining them. What essentially characterises 
a religious teacher, and gives him his permanent worth 
and vitality, is, after all, just the scientific value of his 
teaching, its correspondence with important facts, and 



10 vS/. Paul and Protestantism. 

the light it throws on them. Never was the tnith of this 
so evident as now. The scientific sense in man never 
asserted its claim so strongly ; the propensity of religion 
to neglect those claims, and the peril and loss to it from 
neglecting them, never were so manifest. The license of 
affirmation about God and his proceedings, in which the 
religious world indulge, is more and more met by the 
demand for verification. When Calvinism tells us : 'It is 
agreed between God and the Mediator Jesus Christ, the 
Son of God, surety for the redeemed, as parties-contrac- 
tors, that the sins of the redeemed should be imputed to 
innocent Christ, and he both condemned and put to 
death for them, upon this very condition, that whosoever 
heartily consents unto the covenant of reconciliation 
offered through Christ, shall, by the imputation of his 
obedience unto them, be justified and holden righteous 
before God ; ' — when Calvinism tells us this, is it not 
talking about God just as if he were a man in the next 
street, whose proceedings Calvinism intimately knew and 
could give account of, could verify that account at any 
moment, and enable us to verify it also? It is true, 
when the scientific sense in us, the sense which seeks 
exact knowledge, calls for that verification, Calvinism 
refers us to St. Paul, from whom it professes to have 
got this history of what it calls ' the covenant of redemp- 



SL Paid and Protestantism. 1 1 

tion.' But this is only pushing the difficulty a stage 
further back. For if it is St. Paul, and not Calvinism, 
that professes this exact acquaintance with God and his 
doings, the scientific sense calls upon St. Paul to pro- 
duce the facts by which he verifies what he says ; and 
if he cannot produce them, then it treats both St. Paul's 
assertion, and Calvinism's assertion after him, as of no 
real consequence. 

No one will deny that such is the behaviour of science 
towards religion in our day, though many may deplore it. 
And it is not that the scientific sense in us denies the 
rights of the poetic sense, which employs a figured and 
imaginative language. But the language we have just 
been quoting is not figurative and poetic language, it is 
scholastic and scientific language. Assertions in scientific 
language must stand the tests of scientific examination. 
Neither is it that the scientific sense in us refuses to admit 
willingly and reverently the name of God, as a point in 
which the religious and the scientific sense may meet, as 
the least inadequate name for that universal order which 
the intellect feels after as a law, and the heart feels after 
as a benefit. ' We, too,' might the men of science with 
truth say to the men of rehgion — ' we, too, would gladly 
say God, if only, the moment one says God, you would 
not pester one with your pretensions of knowing all about 



12 St. Paul and Protestantis7n. 

him.' That stream of tendency by which all 'things strive 
to fulfil the law of their being, and which, inasmuch as' our 
idea of real welfare resolves itself into this fulfilment of 
the law of one's being, man rightly deems the fountain of 
all goodness, and calls by the worthiest and most solemn 
name he can, which is God, science also might willingly 
own for the fountain of all goodness, and call God. But 
however much more than this the heart may with propriety 
put into its language respecting God, this is as much as 
science can with strictness put there. Therefore, when 
the religious world, following its bent of trying to describe 
what it loves, amplifying and again amplifying its descrip- 
tion, and guarding finally this amplified description by 
the most precise and rigid terms it can find, comes at 
last, with the best intentions, to the notion of a sort of 
magnified and non-natural man, who proceeds in the 
fashion laid down in the Calvinistic thesis we have quoted, 
then science strikes in, remarks the difference between 
this second notion and the notion it originally admitted, 
and demands to have the new notion verified, as the first 
can be verified, by facts. But this does not unsettle the 
first notion, or prevent science from acknowledging 
the importance and the scientific validity of propositions 
which are grounded upon the first notioi), and shed light 
over it. 



St. Paid and Protestantism. 1 3 

Nevertheless, researches in this sphere are now a 
good deal eclipsed in popularity by researches in the 
sphere of physics, and no longer have the vogue which 
they once had. I have related how an eminent physicist 
with whose acquaintance I am honoured, imagines me 
to have invented the author of the Sacra Privata; and 
that fashionable newspaper, the Morning Post, under- 
taking, — as I seemed, it said, very anxious about the 
matter, — to supply information as to who the author 
really was, laid it down that he was Bishop of Calcutta, 
and that his ideas and writmgs, to which I attached so 
much value, had been among the main provocatives of 
the Indian mutiny. Therefore it is perhaps expedient 
to refresh our memory as to these schemes of doctrine, 
Calvinistic or Amiinian, for the upholding of which, as 
has been said, British Puritanism exists, before we pro- 
ceed to compare them, for correspondence with facts and 
for scientific validity, with the teaching of St. Paul. 

Calvinism, then, begins by laying down that God 
from all eternity decreed whatever was to come to pass 
in time ; that by his decree a certain number of angels 
and men are predestinated, out of God's mere free grace 
and love, without any foresight of faith or good works 
in them, to everlasting life ; and others foreordained, 
according to the unsearchable counsel of his will, whereby 



14 St. Paul and Protestantism. 

he extends or withholds mercy as he pleases, to everlast- 
ing death. God made, however, our first parents, Adam 
and Eve, upright and able to keep his law, which was 
written in their hearts ; at the same time entering into a 
contract with them, and with their posterity as repre- 
sented in them, by which they were assured of everlasting 
life in return for perfect obedience, and of everlasting 
death if they should be disobedient. Our first parents, 
being enticed by Satan, a fallen angel speaking in the 
form of a serpent, broke this covena?it of works, as it is 
called, by eating the forbidden fruit ; and hereby they, 
and their posterity in them and with them, became not 
only liable to eternal death, but lost also their natural up- 
rightness and all ability to please God ; nay, they became 
by nature enemies to God and to all spiritual good, and in- 
clined only to evil continually. This, says Calvinism, is 
our original sin ; the bitter root of all our actual trans- 
gressions, in thought, word, and deed. 

Yet, though man has neither power nor incUnation 
to rise out of this wretched fallen state, but is rather 
disposed to lie insensible in it till he perish, another 
covenant exists by which his condition is greatly aff"ected. 
This is the covetiant of rede^nption, made and agreed upon, 
says Calvinism, between God the Father and God the 
Son in the Council of the Trinity before the world began. 



St. Paul and Protestantism. 1 5 

The sum of the covenant of redemption is this : God 
having, by the eternal decree aheady mentioned, freely 
chosen to life a certain number of lost mankind, gave 
them before the world began to God the Son, appointed 
Redeemer, on condition that if he humbled himself so 
far as to assume the human nature in union with the 
divine nature, submit himself to the law as surety for the 
elect, and satisfy justice for them by giving obedience in 
their name, even to suffering the cursed death of the 
cross, he should ransom and redeem them from sin and 
death, and purchase for them righteousness and eternal 
life. The Son of God accepted the condition, or bargain 
as Calvinism calls it ; and in the fulness of time came, as 
Jesus Christ, into the world, was born of the Virgin Mary, 
subjected himself to the law, and completely paid the due 
ransom on the cross. 

God has in his word, the Bible, revealed to man this 
covenant of grace or redemption. All those whom he 
has predestinated to life he in his own time effectually 
calls to be partakers in the release offered. Man is alto- 
gether passive in this call, until the Holy Spirit enables 
him to answer it. The Holy Spirit, the third person in 
the Trinity, apphes to the elect the redemption purchased 
by Christ, through working faith in them. As soon as 
the elect have faith in Jesus Christ, that is, as soon as 



1 6 St. Paul and Protestantism. 

they give their consent heartily and repentantly, in the 
sense of deserved condemnation, to the covenant of 
grace, God justifies them by imputing to them that per- 
fect obedience which Christ gave to the law, and the 
satisfaction also which upon the cross Christ gave to 
justice in their name. They who are thus called and 
justified are by the same power likewise sanctified ; the 
dominion of carnal lusts being destroyed in them, and 
the practice of holiness being, in spite of some remnants 
of corruption, put in their power. Good works, done in 
obedience to God's moral law, are the fruits and evi- 
dences of a true faith ; and the persons of the faithful 
elect being accepted through Christ, their good works 
also are accepted in him and rewarded. But works done 
by other and unregenerate men, though they may be 
things which God commands, cannot please God and are 
sinful. The elect can after justification and sanctification 
no more fall from the state of grace, but shall certainly 
persevere to the end and be eternally saved ; and of this 
they may, even in the present life, have the certain assur- 
ance. Finally, after death, their souls and bodies are 
joyfully joined together again in the resurrection, and 
they remain thenceforth for ever with Christ in glory; 
while all the wicked are sent away into hell with Satan, 
whom they have served. 



St. Paul and Protestantism. 17 

We have here set down the main doctrines of Cal- 
vinistic Puritanism almost entirely in words of its own 
choosing. It is not necessary to enter into distinctions 
such as those between sublapsarians and supralapsarians, 
between Calvinists who believe that God's decree of 
election and reprobation was passed in foresight of 
original sin and on account of it, and Calvinists who 
believe that it was passed absolutely and independently. 
The important points of Calvinism, — original sin, free 
election, effectual calling, justification through imputed 
righteousness, — are common to both. The passiveness 
of man, the activity of God, are the great features 
in this scheme ; there is very little of what man thinks 
and does, very much of what God thinks and does ; 
and what God thinks and does is described with such 
particularity that the figure we have used of the man 
in the next street cannot but recur strongly to our 
minds. 

The positive Protestantism of Puritanism, with 
which we are here concerned, as distinguished from 
the negative Protestantism of the Church of England, 
has nourished itself with ardour on this scheme of 
doctrine. It informs and fashions the whole religion 
of Scotland, estabHshed and nonconforming. It is the 
doctrine which Puritan flocks delight to hear from their 

c 



f 8 St. Paid and Protestantism. 

ministers. It was Puritanism's constant reproach against 
the Church of England, that this essential doctrine 
was not firmly enough held and set forth by her. At 
the Hampton Court Conference in 1604, in the Com- 
mittee of Divines appointed by the House of Lords in 
1 64 1 5 and again at the Savoy Conference in 1661, the 
reproach regularly appeared. 'Some have defended/ 
is the Puritan complaint, ' the whole gross substance of 
Arminianism, that the act of conversion depends upon 
the concurrence of man's free will ; some do teach and 
preach that good works are concauses with faith in the 
act of justification ; some have defended universal grace, 
some have absolutely denied original sin.' As Puri- 
tanism grew, the Calvinistic scheme of doctrine hardened 
and became stricter. Of the Calvinistic confessions of 
faith of the sixteenth century, — the Helvetic Confession, 
the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, — the 
Calvinism is so moderate as to astonish any one who 
has been used only to its later developments. Even the 
much abused canons of the Synod of Dort no one can 
read attentively through without finding in parts of them 
a genuine movement of thought, — sometimes even a 
philosophic depth, — and a powerful religious feeling. In 
the documents of the Westminster Assembly, twenty-five 
years later, this has disappeared ; and what we call the 



St. Paul and Protestantism. 19 

British Philistine stands in his religious capacity^ sheer 
and stark, before us. Seriousness is the one merit of 
these documents, but it is a seriousness too mixed with 
the alloy of mundane strife and hatred to be called a 
religious feeling. Not a trace of delicacy of perception, 
or of philosophic thinking ; the mere rigidness and con- 
tentiousness of the controversialist and political dissenter ; 
a Calvinism exaggerated till it is simply repelling; and 
to complete the whole, a machinery of covenants, con- 
ditions, bargains, and parties-contractors, such as could 
have proceeded from no one but the bom Anglo-Saxon 
man of business, British or American. 

However, a scheme of doctrine is not necessarily 
false because of the style in which its adherents may 
have at a particular moment enounced it. From the 
faults which disfigure the performance of the West- 
minster divines the profession of faith prefixed to the 
Congregational Year-Book is free. The Congregation- 
alists form one of the two great divisions of Enghsh 
Puritans. 'Congregational churches believe,' their 
Year-Book tells us, 'that the first man disobeyed the 
divine command, fell from his state of innocence and 
purity, and involved all his posterity in the conse- 
quences of that fall. They beheve that all who will 
be saved were the objects of God's eternal and electing 

c 2 



20 St. Paul mtd Protestantism. 

love, and were given by an act of divine sovereignty 
to the Son of God. They beheve that Christ meri- 
toriously obtained eternal redemption for us, and that 
the Holy Spirit is given in consequence of Christ's 
mediation.' The essential points of Calvinism are all 
here. To this profession of faith, annually published 
in the Year-Book of the Independents, subscription is 
not required; Puritanism thus remaining honourably 
consistent with the protests which, at the Restoration, 
it made against the call for subscription. But the 
authors of the Year-Book say with pride, and it is a 
common boast of the Independent churches, that 
though they do not require subscription, there is, per- 
haps, in no religious body, such firm and general agree- 
ment in doctrine as among CongregationaHsts. This is 
true, and it is even more true of the flocks than of the 
ministers, of whom the abler and the younger begin to 
be lifted by the stream of modern ideas. Still, up 
to the present time, the Protestantism of one great 
division of English Puritans is undoubtedly Calvinist ; 
the Baptists holding in general the scheme of Calvinism 
yet more strictly than the Independents. 

The other great division of English Puritanism is 
formed by the Methodists. Wesleyan Methodism is, 
as is well known, not Calvinist, but Arminian. The 



SL Paul and Protestantism. 2 1 

Methodist Magazine was called by Wesley the Arminian 
Magazine^ and kept that title all through his life. Ar- 
minianism is an attempt made with the best intentions, 
and with much truth of practical sense, but not in a 
very profound philosophical spirit, to escape from what 
perplexes and shocks us in Calvinism. The God of 
Calvinism is a magnified and non-natural man who 
decrees at his mere good pleasure some men to sal- 
vation and other men to reprobation; the God of 
Arminianism is a magnified and non -natural man who 
foreknows the course of each man's life, and who de- 
crees each of us to salvation or reprobation in accord- 
ance with this foreknowledge. But so long as we remain 
in this anthropomorphic order of ideas the question will 
always occur : Why did not a being of infinite power 
and infinite love so make all men as that there should be 
no cause for this sad foreknowledge and sad decree 
respecting a number of them ? In truth, Calvinism is 
both theologically more coherent, and also shows a 
deeper sense of reality than Arminianism, which, in the 
practical man's fashion, is apt to scrape the surface of 
things only. 

For instance, the Arminian Remonstrants, in their 
zeal to justify the morality, in a human sense, of God's 
ways, maintained that he sent his word to one nation 



J 



22 St. Paul and Protestantism. 

rather than another according as he saw that one nation 
was more worthy than another of such a preference. 
The Calvinist doctors of the Synod of Dort have no 
difficulty in showing that Moses and Christ both of them 
assert, with respect to the Jewish nation, the direct con- 
trary; and not only do they here obtain a theological 
triumph, but in rebutting the Arminian theory they are in 
accordance with historical truth and with the real march 
of human affairs. They allow more for the great fact of 
the not owselves in what we do and are. The Calvinists 
seize, we say, that great fact better than the Arminians. 
The Calvinist's fault is in his scientific appreciation of the 
fact ; in the reasons he gives for it. God, he says, sends 
his word to one nation rather than another at his 77iere 
good pleasure. Here we have again the magnified and 
non-natural man, who likes and dislikes, knows and 
decrees, just as a man, only on a scale immensely tran- 
scending anything of which we have experience ; and 
whose proceedings we nevertheless describe as if he were 
in the next street for people to verify all we say about 
him. 

Arminian Methodism, however, puts aside the Cal- 
vinistic doctrine of predestination. The foremost place, 
which in the Calvinist scheme belongs to the doctrine of 
predestination, belongs in the Methodist scheme to the 



67. Paul and Protestantism. 23 

doctrine of justification by faith. More and more promi- 
nently does modern Methodism elevate this as its essen- 
tial doctrine ; and the era in their founder's life which 
Methodists select to celebrate is the era of his conversion 
to it. It is the doctrine of Anselm, adopted and deve- 
loped by Luther, set forth in the Confession of Augsburg, 
and current all through the popular theology of our day. 
We shall find it in almost any popular hymn we happen 
to take, but the following Hues of Milton exhibit it 
classically. By the fall of our first parents, says he : — 

Man, losing all, 
To expiate his treason hath nought left, 
But to destruction sacred and devote 
He with his whole posterity must die ; 
Die he or justice must ; unless for him 
Some other able, and as willing, pay 
The rigid satisfaction ; death for death. 

By Adam's fall, God's justice and mercy were placed 
in conflict. God could not follow his mercy without 
violating his justice. Christ by his satisfaction gave the 
Father the right and power {iiudwn jus Patri acquirebat, 
said the Arminians) to follow his mercy, and to make 
with man the covenant of free justification by faith, 
whereby, if a man has a sure trust and confidence that 
his sins are forgiven him in virtue of the satisfaction 



24 St. Paul and Protestantism. 

made to God for them by the death of Christ, he is held 
clear of sin by God, and admitted to salvation. 

This doctrine, like the Calvinist doctrine of predesti- 
nation, involves a whole history of God's proceedings, 
and gives, also, first and almost sole place to what God 
does, with disregard to what man does. It has thus an 
essential affinity with Calvinism ; indeed, Calvinism is 
but this doctrine of original sin and justification, plus the 
doctrine of predestination. Nay, the Welsh Methodists, 
as is well known, have no difficulty in combining the 
tenet of election with the practices and most of the 
tenets of Methodism. The word solifidian points pre- 
cisely to that which is common to both Calvinism and 
Methodism, and which has made both these halves of 
English Puritanism so popular, — their sensational side, as 
it may be called, their laying all stress on a wonderful and 
particular account of what God gives and works for us, not 
on what we bring or do for ourselves. ' Plead thou singly,' 
says Wesley, * the blood of the covenant, the ransom 
paid for thy proud stubborn soul' Wesley's doctrines 
of conversion, of the new birth, of sanctifi cation, of the 
direct witness of the spirit, of assurance, of sinless per- 
fection, all of them thus correspond with doctrines which 
we have noticed in Calvinism, and show a common 
character with them. The instantaneousness Wesley 



St. Paul and Protestantism. 25 

loved to ascribe to conversion and sanctification points 
the same way. ' God gives in a moment such a faith 
in the blood of his Son as translates us out of darkness 
into light, out of sin and fear into holiness and happi- 
ness.' And again, ' Look for sanctification just as you 
are, as a poor sinner that has nothing to pay, nothing to 
plead but Christ died.' This is the side in Wesley's 
teaching which his followers have above all seized, and 
which they are eager to hold forth as the essential part 
of his legacy towards them. 

It is true that from the same reason which prevents, 
as we have said, those who know their Bible and nothing 
else from really knowing even their Bible, Methodists, 
who for the most part know nothing but Wesley, do not 
really know even Wesley. It is true that what really 
characterises this most interesting and most attractive 
man, is not his doctrine of justification by faith, or any 
other of his set doctrines, but is entirely what we may 
call his genius for godliness. Mr. Alexander Knox, in 
his remarks on his friend's life and character, insists 
much on an entry in Wesley's Journal in 1767, where he 
seems impatient at the endless harping on the tenet of 
justification, and where he asks ' if it is not high time to 
return to the plain word : "He that feareth God and 
worketh righteousness is accepted with him." ' Mr. Knox 



26 St. Paul and Protestantism. 

is right in thinking that the feeling which made Wesley 
ask this is what gave him his vital worth and character 
as a man ; but it is not what gives him his character as 
the teacher of Methodism. Methodism rejects Mr. 
Knox's version of its founder, and insists on making the 
article of justification the very corner-stone of the Wes- 
leyan edifice. 

And the truth undoubtedly is, that not by his asser- 
tion of what man brings, but by his assertion of what 
God gives, by his doctrines of conversion, instantaneous 
justification and sanctification, assurance, and sinless per- 
fection, does Wesley live and operate in Methodism. 
' You think, I must first be or do thus or thus (for sancti- 
fication). Then you are seeking it by works unto this 
day. If you seek it by faith, you may expect it as you 
are ; then expect it now. It is of importance to observe 
that there is an inseparable connection between these 
three points : expect it by faith ^ expect it as you are, and 
expect it now. To deny one of them is to deny them 
all; to allow one is to allow them all.' This is the 
teaching of Wesley, which has made the great Methodist 
half of English Puritanism what it is, and not his hesita- 
tions and recoils at the dangers of his own teaching. 

No doubt, as the seriousness of Calvinism, its per- 
petual conversance with deep matters and with the 



St. Paul and Protestantism. 27 

Bible, have given force and fervency to Calvinist Puritans, 
so the loveliness of Wesley's piety, and what we 
have called his genius for godliness, have sweetened 
and made amiable numberless lives of Methodist 
Puritans. But as a religious teacher, Wesley is to 
be judged by his doctrine ; and his doctrine, like 
the Calvinistic scheme, rests with all its weight on 
the assertion of certain minutely described proceedings 
on God's part, independent of us, our experience, and 
our will ; and leads its recipients to look, in religion, not 
so much for an arduous progress on their own part, and 
the exercise of their activity, as for strokes of magic, and 
what may be called a sensational character. 

In the Heidelberg Catechism, after an answer in 
which the catechist rehearses the popularly received 
doctrine of original sin and vicarious satisfaction for it, 
the catechiser asks the pertinent question : ' U7tde id 
scis 1 ' — how do you know all that ? The Apostle Paul is, 
as we have already shown, the great authority for it whom 
formal theology invokes ; his name is used by popular 
theology with the same confidence. I open a modern 
book of popular religion at the account of a visit paid to 
a hardened criminal seized with terror the night before 
his execution. The visitor says : '■ I now sia?id in Paiirs 
place, and say: In Christ's stead we pray you, be ye 



28 St. Paul and Protestantism. 

reconciled to God. I beg you to accept the pardon of 
all your sins, which Christ has purchased for you, and 
which God freely bestows on you for his sake. If you 
do not understand, I say : God's ways are not as our 
ways.' And the narrative of the criminal's conversion 
goes on : ' That night was spent in singing the praises of 
the Saviour who had purchased his pardon,' 

Both Calvinism and Methodism appeal, therefore, 
to the Bible, and, above all, to St. Paul, for the history 
they propound of the relations between God and man ; 
but Calvinism relies most, in enforcing it, on man's fears, 
Methodism on man's hopes. Calvinism insists on man's 
being under a curse ; it then works the sense of sin, 
misery, and terror in him, and appeals pre-eminently to 
the desire to flee from the wrath to come. Methodism, 
too, insists on his being under a curse ; but it works 
most the sense of hope in him, the craving for happiness, 
and appeals pre-eminently to the desire for eternal bliss. 
No one, however, will maintain that the particular account 
of God's proceedings with man, whereby Methodism and 
Calvinism operate on these desires, proves itself by in- 
ternal evidence, and establishes without external aid its 
own scientific validity. So we may either directly try, as 
best we can, its scientific validity in itself; or, as it pro- 
fesses to have Paul's authority to support it, we may first 



St. Paul and Protestantism. 29 

inquire what is really Paul's account of God's proceed - 
ings with man, and whether this talHes with the Puritan 
account and confirms it. The latter is in every way the 
safer and the more instructive course to follow. And we 
will follow Puritanism's example in taking St. Paul's 
mature and greatest work, the Epistle to the Romans, as 
the chief place for finding what he really thought on the 
points in question. 

We have already said elsewhere,^ indeed, what is 
very true, and what must never be forgotten, that what 
St. Paul, a man so separated from us by time, race, 
training and circumstances, really thought, we cannot 
make sure of knowing exactly. All we can do is to get 
near it, reading him with the sort of critical tact which 
the study of the human mind and its history, and the 
acquaintance with many great writers, naturally gives for 
following the movement of any one single great writer's 
thought ; reading him, also, without preconceived theories 
to which we want to make his thoughts fit themselves. 
It is evident that the English translation of the Epistle 
to the Romans has been made by men with their heads 
full of the current doctrines of election and justification 
we have been noticing ; and it has thereby received such 
a bias, — of which a strong example is the use of the word 
' See Culture and Attarchy^ chap. v. 



30 St. Paul and Protestajttism. 

atonement in the eleventh verse of the fifth chapter, — that 
perhaps it is ahiiost impossible for any one who reads 
the English translation only, to take into his mind Paul's 
thought without a colouring from the current doctrines. 
But besides discarding the EngHsh translation, we must 
bear in mind, if we wish to get as near Paul's real 
thought as possible, two things which have greatly 
increased the faciHties for misrepresenting him. 

In the first place, Paul, like the other Bible-writers, 
and like the Semitic race in general, has a much juster 
sense of the true scope and limits of diction in religious 
deliverances than we have. He uses within the sphere of 
religious emotion expressions which, in this sphere, have 
an eloquence and a propriety, but which are not to be 
taken out of it and made into formal scientific pro- 
positions. 

This is a point very necessary to be borne in mind in 
reading the Bible. The prophet Nahum says in the 
book of his vision : ' God is Jealous, and the Lo7'd 
revengeth ;'^ and the authors of the Westminster Confes- 
sion, drawing out a scientific theology, lay down the 
proposition that God is a jealous and vengeful God, and 
think they prove their proposition by quoting in a note 
the words of Nahum. But this is as if we took from a 
' Nahum i, 2 



St. Paid and Protestantism. 3 1 

chorus of ^schylus one of his grand passages about 
guilt and destiny, just put the words straight into the 
formal and exact cast of a sentence of Aristotle, and said 
that here was the scientific teaching of Greek philosophy 
on these matters. The Hebrew genius has not, like the 
Greek, its conscious and clear-marked division into a 
poetic side and a scientific side; the scientific side is 
almost absent. The Bible utterances have often the 
character of a chorus of ^schylus, but never that of 
a treatise of Aristotle. We, like the Greeks, possess in 
our speech and thought the two characters ; but so far 
as the Bible is concerned we have generally confounded 
them, and have used our double possession for our 
bewilderment rather than turned it to good account. The 
admirable maxim of the great mediaeval Jewish school of 
Biblical critics : The Law speaks with the tongue of the 
children of 7nen, — a maximx which is the very foundation 
of all sane Biblical criticism, — was for centuries a dead 
letter to the whole body of our Western exegesis, and is 
a dead letter to the whole body of our popular exegesis 
still. Taking the Bible language as equivalent with the 
language of the scientific intellect, a language which is 
adequate and absolute, we have never been in a position 
to use the key which this maxim of the Jewish doctors 
ofi'ers to us. But it is certain that, whatever strain the 



32 St. Paul and Protestantism. 

religious expressions of the Semitic genius were meant, 
in the minds of those who gave utterance to them, to 
bear, the particular strain which we Western people put 
upon them is one which they were not meant to bear. 

We have used the word Hebraise^ for another pur- 
pose, to denote the exclusive attention to the moral side 
of our nature, to conscience, and to doing rather than 
knowing ; so, to describe the vivid and figured way in 
which St. Paul, within the sphere of religious emotion, 
uses words, without carrying them outside it, we will 
use the word Orientalise. When Paul says : * God hath 
concluded them all in unbelief that he might have mercy 
upon all,' he Orientalises ; that is, he does not mean to 
assert formally that God acted with this set design, but, 
being full of the happy and divine end to the unbelief 
spoken of, he, by a vivid and striking figure, represents 
the unbelief as actually caused with a view to this end. 
But when the Calvinists of the Synod of Dort, wishing 
to establish the formal proposition that faith and all 
saving gifts flow from election and nothing else, quote 
an expression of Paul's similar to the one we have quoted, 
' He hath chosen us,' they say, ' not because we were, but 
that we might be holy and without blame before him/ they 
go quite wide of the mark, from not perceiving that what 

' See Culture and Anarchy, chap. iv. ^ Rom. xi, 32. 



St. Paul and Protestantism. 33 

the apostle used as a vivid figure of rhetoric, they are 
using as a formal scientific proposition. 

When Paul Orientalises, the fault is not with him 
when he is misunderstood, but with the prosaic and 
unintelligent Western readers who have not enough tact 
for style to comprehend his mode of expression. But 
he also Judaises ; and here his liabihty to being mis-, 
understood by us Western people is undoubtedly due to 
a defect in the critical habit of himself and his race. A 
Jew himself, he uses the Jewish Scriptures in a Jew's 
arbitrary and uncritical fashion, as if they had a talis-- 
manic character ; as if for a doctrine, however true in 
itself, their confirmation was still necessary, and as if 
this confirmation was to be got from their mere words 
alone, however detached from the sense of their context, 
and however violently allegorised or otherwise wrested. 

To use the Bible in this way, even for purposes of 
illustration, is often an interruption to the argument, a 
fault of style ; to use it in this way for real proof and 
confirmation, is a fault of reasoning. An example of the 
first fault may be seen in the tenth chapter of the Epistle 
to the Romans, and in the beginning of the third chapter. 
The apostle's point in either place,— his point that faith 
comes by hearing, and his point that God's oracles were 
true though the Jews did not believe them, — would stand 

D 



34 ^^- Paul and Protestantism. 

much clearer without their scaffolding of Bible-quotation 
An instance of the second fault is in the third and fourth 
chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians, where the 
Bibhcal argumentation by which the apostle seeks to 
prove his case is as unsound as his case itself is sound. 
How far these faults are due to the apostle himself, how 
far to the requirements of those for whom he wrote, we 
need not now investigate. It is enough that he undoubt- 
edly uses the letter of Scripture in this arbitrary and 
Jewish way ; and thus Puritanism, which has only itself 
to blame for misunderstanding him when he Orientalises, 
may fairly put upon the apostle himself some of its 
blame for misunderstanding him when he Judaises, 
and for Judaising so strenuously along with him. 

To get, therefore, at what Paul really thought and 
meant to say, it is necessary for us modern and western 
people to translate him. And not as Puritanism, which 
has merely taken his letter and recast it in the formal 
propositions of a modern scientific treatise ; but his 
letter itself must be recast before it can be properly 
conveyed by such propositions. And as the order in 
which, in any series of ideas, the ideas come, is of great 
importance to the final result, and as Paul, who did not 
write scientific treatises, but had always religious edifica- 
tion in direct view, never set out his doctrine with a 



St. Paul a7td Protestantism. 35 

design of exhibiting it as a scientific whole, we must also 
find out for ourselves the order in which Paul's ideas 
naturally stand, and the connexion between one of 
them and the other, in order to arrive at the real 
scheme of his teaching, as compared with the schemes 
exhibited by Puritanism. 

We remarked how what sets the Calvinist in motion 
seems to be the desire to flee from the wrath to come ; 
and what sets the Methodist in motion, the desire for 
eternal bliss. What is it which sets Paul in motion ? 
It is the impulse which we have elsewhere noted as the 
master-impulse of Hebraism, — the desire for righteousness 
' I exercise myself,' he told Felix, ' to have a conscience 
void of offence towards God and men continually' ^ To 
the Hebrew, this moral order, or righteousness, was 
pre-eminently the universal order, the law of God ; and 
God, the fountain of all goodness, was pre-eminently to 
him the giver of the moral law. The end and aim 
of all religion, access to God, — the sense of harmony 
with the universal order — the partaking of the divine 
nature — that our faith and hope might be in God — that 
we might have life and have it more abundantly, 
— meant for the Hebrew, access to the source of 
the moral order in especial, and harmony with 
' Acts, xxiv, 16. 
D 2 



36 St. Patil and Protestantism. 

it. It was the greatness of the Hebrew race that 
it felt the authority of this order, its preciousness and 
its beneficence, so strongly, 'How precious are thy 
thoughts unto me, O God V — 'The law of thy mouth is 
better than thousands of gold and silver.' — 'My soul 
is consumed with the very fervent desire that it hath 
alway unto thy judgments.' ^ It was the greatness of 
their best individuals that in them this feeling was 
incessantly urgent to prove itself in the only sure 
manner,— in action. ' Blessed are they who hear the 
word of God, and keep it.' ' If thou wouldst enter 
into life, keep the commandments.' ' Let no man 
deceive you, he that doeth righteousness is righteous.' ^ 
What distinguishes Paul is both his conviction that the 
commandment is holy, and just, and good ; and also his 
desire to give effect to the commandment, to establish it. 
It was this which gave to his endeavour after a clear 
conscience such meaning and efficacity. It was this 
which gave him insight to see that there could be no 
radical difference, in respect of salvation and the way 
to it, between Jew and Gentile. ' Upon every soul of 
man that worketh evil^ whoever he may be, tribulation and 

* Ps. cxxxix, 7 ; cxix, 72 ; Ibid., 20. 

2 Luke, xi, 28; Matth., xix, 17 ; i John, iii, 7. 



St. Paul a7id Protestantism. 37 

anguish ; to every one that worketh good, glory, honour, 
and peace ! ' ^ 

St. Paul's piercing practical religious sense, joined to 
his strong intellectual power, enabled him to discern and 
follow the range of the commandment, both as to man's 
actions and as to his heart and thoughts, with ex- 
traordinary force and closeness. His religion had, as we 
shall see, a preponderantly mystic side, and nothing is so 
natural to the mystic as in rich single words, such as 
faith, light, love, to sum up and take for granted, with- 
out specially enumerating them^ all good moral prin- 
ciples and habits ; yet nothing is more remarkable in 
Paul than the frequent, nay, incessant lists, in the most 
particular detail, of moral habits to be pursued or avoided. 
Lists of this sort might in a less sincere and profound 
writer be formal and wearisome ; but to no attentive 
reader of St. Paul will they be wearisome, for in making 
them he touched the solid ground which was the basis 
of his religion, — the solid ground of his hearty desire 
for righteousness and of his thorough, conception of it, — 
and only on such a ground was so strong a super 
structure possible. The more one studies these lists, 
the more does their significance come out. To illus- 
trate this, let any one go through for himself the enume- 
ration, too long to be quoted here, in the four last verses 
^ Rom , ii, 9, 10, 



38 St. Paid and Protestantism. 

of the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, of 
' things which are not convenient ; ' or let him merely 
consider with attention this catalogue, towards the end 
of the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Galatians, of 
fruits of the spirit : 'love, joy, peace, long-suffering, 
kindness, goodness, faith, mildness, self-control.' ^ The 
man who wrote with this searching minuteness knew 
accurately what he meant by sin and righteousness, and 
did not use these words at random. His diligent com- 
prehensiveness in his plan of duties is only less 
admirable than his diligent sincerity. The sterner 
virtues and the gentler, his conscience will not let him 
rest till he has embraced them all. In his deep resolve 
' to make out by actual trial what is that good and 
perfect and acceptable will of God,' ^ he goes back upon 
himself again and again, he marks a duty at every point 
of our nature, and at points the most opposite, for fear 
he should by possibility be leaving behind him some 
weakness still indulged, some subtle promptings to evil 
not yet brought into captivity. 

It has not been enough remarked how this incom- 
parable honesty and depth in Paul's love of righteous- 
ness is probably what chiefly explains his conversion. 
Most men have the defects, as the saying is, of their 
' Verses 22, 23. ^ Rom., xii, 2. 



St. Paul and Protestantism. 39 

qualities. Because they are ardent and severe they have 
no sense for gentleness and sweetness ; because they are 
sweet and gentle they have no sense for severity and 
ardour. A Puritan is a Puritan, and a man of feeling is 
a man of feeling. But with Paul the very same fulness 
of moral nature which made him an ardent Pharisee, 
' as concerning zeal, persecuting the church, touching 
the righteousness which is in the law, blameless,' was so 
large that it carried him out of Pharisaism and beyond it, 
when once he found how much needed doing in him 
which Pharisaism could not do. 

Every attentive regarder of the character of Paul, not 
only as he was before his conversion but as he appears 
to us till his end, must have been struck with two things : 
one, the earnest insistance with whiSli he recommends 
' bowels of mercies,' as he calls them : meekness, hum- 
bleness of mind, gentleness, unwearying forbearance, 
crowned all of them with that emotion of charity ' which 
is the bond of perfectness ; ' the other, the force with 
which he dwells on the solidarity (to use the modern 
phrase) of man, — the joint interest, that is, which binds 
humanity together, — the duty of respecting every one's 
part in life, and of doing justice to his efforts to fulfil that 
part. Never surely did such a controversialist, such a 
master of sarcasm and invective, commend, with such 



40 . St. Paul and Protestantism, 

manifest sincerity and such persuasive emotion, the 
quahties of meekness and gentleness ! Never surely did 
a worker, who took with such energy his own line, and 
who was so born to preponderate and predominate 
in whatever line he took, insist so often and so admirably 
that the lines of other workers were just as- good as his 
own ! At no time, perhaps, did Paul arrive at practising 
quite perfectly what he thus preached ; but this only sets 
in a stronger light the thorough love of righteousness 
which made him seek out, and put so prominently for- 
ward, and so strive to make himself and others fulfil, 
parts of righteousness which do not force themselves on 
the common conscience like the duties of soberness, 
temperance, and activity, and which were somewhat alien, 
certainly, to his own particular nature. Therefore we 
cannot but beheve that into this spirit, so possessed with 
the hunger and thirst for righteousness, and precisely 
because it was so possessed by it, the characteristic 
doctrines of Jesus, which brought a new aliment to feed 
this hunger and thirst, — of Jesus whom, except in vision, 
he had never seen, but who was in every one's words and 
thoughts, the teacher who was meek and lowly in heart, 
who said men were brothers and must love one another, 
that the last should often be first, that the exercise of 
dominion and lordship had nothing in them desirable. 



St. Paid and Protestantism. 41 

and that we must become as little children, — sank down 
and worked there even before Paul ceased to persecute, 
and had no small part in getting him ready for the crisis 
of his conversion. 

Such doctrines offered new fields of righteousness to 
the eyes of this indefatigable explorer of it, and enlarged 
the domain of duty of which Pharisaism showed him 
only a portion Then, after the satisfaction thus given 
to his desire for a full conception of righteousness, came 
Christ's injunctions to make clean the inside as well as 
the outside, to beware of the least leaven of hypocrisy 
and self-flattery, of saying and not doing j — and, finally, 
the injunction to feel, after doing all we can, that, as 
compared with the standard of perfection, we are still 
unprofitable servants. These teachings were, to a man 
like Paul, for the practice of righteousness what the 
others were for the theory j — sympathetic utterances, 
which made the inmost chords of his being vibrate, and 
which irresistibly drew him sooner or later towards their 
utterer. Need it be said that he never forgot them, and 
that in all his pages they have left their trace ? It is 
even affecting to see, how, when he is driven for the 
very sake of righteousness to put the law of righteous- 
ness in the second place, and to seek outside the law 
itself for a power to fulfil the law, how, I say, he returns 



42 St. Paul and Protestantism. 

again and again to the elucidation of his one sole design 
in all he is doing ; how he labours to prevent all pos- 
sibiHty of misunderstanding, and to show that he is only 
leaving the moral law for a moment in order to establish 
it for ever more victoriously. What earnestness and 
pathos in the assurance : ' If there had been a law given 
which could have given life, verily, righteousness should 
have been by the law ! ^ ' Do I condemn the law ? ' 
he keeps saying ; ' do I forget that the commandment is 
holy, just, and good? Because we are no longer under 
the law, are we to sin ? Am I seeking to make the 
course of my life and yours other than a service and an 
obedience?' This man, out of whom an astounding 
criticism has ded:iced Antinomianism, is in truth so 
possessed with horror of Antinomianism, that he goes 
to grace for the sole purpose of extirpating it, and even 
then cannot rest without perpetually telling us why he 
is gone there. This man, whom Calvin and Luther and 
their followers have shut up into the two scholastic 
doctrines of election and justification, would have said, 
could we hear him, just what he said about circumcision 
and uncircumcision in his own day : '■ Election is nothmg, 
and justification is nothing, but the keeping of the com- 
mandments of God.' 

» GaL. iii, 21. 



St. Paul and Protesta^itisrn. 43 

This foremost place which righteousness takes in the 
order of St. Paul's ideas makes a signal difference 
between him and Puritanism. Puritanism, as we have 
said, finds its starting-point either in the desire to flee 
from eternal wrath or in the desire to obtain eternal 
bliss. Puritanism has learned from revelation, as it 
says, a particular history of the first man's fall, of 
mankind being under a curse, of certain contracts having 
been passed concerning mankind in the Council of the 
Trinity, of the substance of those contracts, and of man's 
position under them. The great concern of Puritanism 
is with the operation of those contracts on man's con- 
dition ; its leading thought, if it is a Puritanism of a 
gloomy turn, is of awe and fear caused by the threatening 
aspect of man's condition under these contracts ; if of a 
cheerful turn, of gratitude and hope caused by the 
favourable aspect of it. But in either case, foregone 
events, the covenant passed, what God has done and 
does, is the great matter. What there is left for man to do, 
the human work of righteousness, is secondary, and 
comes in but to attest and confirm our assurance of what 
God has done for us. We have seen this m Wesley's 
words already quoted : the first thing for a man is to be 
justified and sanctified, and to have the assurance that, 
without seeking it by works, he is justified and sanctified; 



44 ^^- P(iid cind Protestantism. 

then the desire and works of righteousness follow as a 
proper result of this condition. Still more does Calvin- 
ism make man's desire and works of righteousness 
mere evidences and benefits of more important things ; 
the desire to work righteousness is among the saving 
graces applied by the Holy Spirit to the elect, and the 
last of those graces. Deniqiie, says the Synod of Dort, 
last of all, after faith in the promises and after the 
\vitness of the Spirit, comes, to establish our assurance, a 
clear conscience and righteousness. It is manifest how 
unlike is this order of ideas to Paul's order, who starts 
with the thought of a conscience void of offence 
towards God and man, and builds upon that thought his 
whole system. 

But this difference constitutes from the very outset 
an immense scientific superiority for the scheme of Paul. 
Hope and fear are elements of human nature like the 
love of right, but they are far blinder and less scientific 
elements of it. ' The Bible is a divine revelation ; the 
Bible declares certain things ; the things it thus declares 
have the witness of our hopes and fears ; ' — this is the 
line of thought followed by Puritanism. But what 
science seeks after is a satisfying rational conception of 
things. A scheme which fails to give this, which gives 
the contrary of this, may indeed be of a nature to move 



St, Paul and Protestantism. 45 

our hopes and fears, but is to science of none the more 
value on that account. 

Nor does our calUng such a scheme a revelation 
mend the matter. Instead of covering the scientific in- 
adequacy of a conception by the authority of a revela- 
tion, science rather proves the authority of a revelation 
by the scientific adequacy of the conceptions given in it, 
and limits the sphere of that authority to the sphere of 
that adequacy. The more an alleged revelation seems 
to contain precious and striking things, the more will 
science be inclined to doubt the correctness of any 
deduction which draws from it, within the sphere of 
these things, a scheme which rationally is not satisfying. 
That the scheme of Puritanism is rationally so little satis- 
fying inclines science, not to take it on the authority of 
the Bible, but to doubt whether it is really in the Bible. 
The first appeal which this scheme, having begun outside 
the sphere of reafity and experience, makes in the sphere 
of reahty and experience, — its first appeal, therefore, to 
science, — the appeal to the witness of human hope and 
fear, does not much mend matters ; for science knows 
that numberless conceptions not rationally satisfying are 
yet the ground of hope and fear. 

Paul does not begin outside the sphere of science ; 
he begins with an appeal to reality and experience. And 



46 St. Paul and Protestantism. 

the appeal here with which he commences has, for 
science, undoubted force and importance ; for he appeals 
to a rational conception which is a part, and perhaps the 
chief part, of our experience ; the conception of the law 
of rightcojisncss, the very law and ground of human nature 
so far as this nature is moral. Things as they truly are, 
—facts, — are the object- matter of science ; and the 
moral law in human nature, however this law may have 
originated, is in our actual experience among the greatest 
of facts. 

If I were not afraid of intruding upon Mr. Ruskin's 
province, I miglit point out the witness which etymology 
itself bears to this law as a prime element and due in 
man's constitution. Our word righteousness means going 
straight, going the way we are meant to go ; there are 
languages in which the word ' way ' or ' road ' is also the 
word for right reason and duty ; the Greek word for 
justice and righteousness has for its foundation, some 
say, the idea of describing a certain line, following a 
certain necessary orbit. But for these fanciful helps 
there is no need. When Paul starts with affirming the 
grandeur and necessity of the law of righteousness, 
science has no difficulty in going along with him. 
When he fixes as man's right aim Move, joy, peace, 
Idng-sufifering, kindness, goodness, faith, mildness, self- 



St. Paul ana Protestantism. 47 

control,'^ he appeals for witness to the truth of what he 
says to an experience too intimate to need illustration or 
argument. 

The best confirmation of the scientific vaHdity of the 
importance which Paul thus attaches to the law of 
righteousness, the law of reason and conscience, God as 
moral law. is to be found in its agreement with the im- 
portance attached to this law by teachers the most unlike 
him ; since in the eye of science an experience gains as 
much by having universality, as in the eye of religion it 
seems to gain by having uniqueness. ' Would you know,' 
says Epictetus, ' the means to perfection which Socrates 
followed ? they were these : in every single matter which 
came before him he made the rule of reason and conscience 
his one rule to follow." Such was precisely the aim of 
Paul also ; it is an aim to which science does homage as 
a satisfying rational conception. And to this aim hope 
and fear properly attach themselves. For on our following 
the clue of moral order, or losing it, depends our happiness 
or misery ; our life or death in the true sense of those 
words ; our harmony with the universal order or our dis- 
harmony with it : our partaking, as St. Paul says, of the 
wrath of God or of the glor^^ of God. So that looking to 
this clue, and fearing to lose hold on it, we may in strict 
^ Gal, V, 22, 23. 



48 St Paul and Protestantism. 

scientific truth say with the author of the Imitation : 
Omnia vajiitas, propter amare Deu7n, et illi soli servii-e. 

But to serve God, to follow that central clue in our 
moral being which unites us to the universal order, is 
no easy task ; and here again we are on the most sure 
ground of experience and psychology. In some way or 
other, says Bishop Wilson, every man is conscious of an 
opposition in him between the flesh and the spirit. Video 
77ieliora proboqjce, deteriora sequor^ say the thousand times 
quoted lines of the Roman poet. The philosophical 
explanation of this conflict does not indeed attribute, like 
the Manichsean fancy, any inherent evil to the flesh and 
its workings ; all the forces and tendencies in us are, like 
our proper central moial tendency the desire of righteous- 
ness, in themselves beneficent. But they require to be 
harmonised with this tendency, because this aims directly 
at our total moral welfare, — our harmony as moral beings 
with the law of our nature and the law of God, — and 
derives thence a pre-eminence and a right to moderate. 
And, though they are not evil in themselves, the evil 
which flows from these diverse workings is unde- 
niable. The lusts of the flesh, the law in our mem- 
bers, passion, according to the Greek word used by 
Paul, inordinate affection^ according to the admirable 



St. Paul and Protestantism. 49 

rendering of Paul's Greek word in our English Bible,' 
take naturally no account of anything but themselves ; 
this arbitrary and unregulated action of theirs can pro- 
duce only confusion and misery. The spirit, the law of 
our mind, takes account of the universal moral order, the 
will of God, and is indeed the voice of that order express- 
ing itself in us. Paul talks of a man sowing to his flesh,^ 
because each of us has of his own this individual body, 
this congeries of flesh and bones, blood and nerves, 
different from that of every one else, and with desires 
and impulses driving each of us his own separate way ; 
and he says that a man who sows to this, sows to a 
thousand tyrants, and can reap no worthy harvest. But 
he talks of sowing to the spirit ; because there is one 
central moral tendency which for us and for all men is 
the law of our being, and through reason and righteous- 
ness we move in this universal order and with it. In 
this conformity to the will of God, as we religiously name 
the moral order, is our peace and happiness. 

But how to find the energy and power to bring all 
those self-seeking tendencies of the flesh, those multitu- 
dinous, swarming, eager, and incessant impulses, into 
obedience to the central tendency ? Mere commanding 
and forbidding is of no avail, and only irritates opposition 

» Col., iii, 5. 2 Qai,^ yi, 8. 

E 



50 St. Paid and Protestantism. 

in the desires it tries to control. It even enlarges their 
power, because it makes us feel our impotence j and 
the confusion caused by their ungoverned working is 
increased by our being filled with a deepened sense of 
disharmony, remorse, and dismay. ' I was alive without 
the law once,' ^ says Paul ; the natural play of all the 
forces and desires in me went on smoothly enough so 
long as I did not attempt to introduce order and regula- 
tion among them. But the condition of immoral tranquil- 
lity could not in man be permanent. That natural law of 
reason and conscience which all men have, was sufficient 
by itself to produce a consciousness of rebellion and dis- 
quietude. Matters became only worse by the exhibition 
of the Mosaic law, the offspring of a moral sense more 
poignant and stricter, however little it might show of 
subtle insight and deHcacy, than the moral sense of the 
mass of mankind. The very stringency of the Mosaic 
code increased the feeling of dismay and helplessness ; 
it set forth the law of righteousness more authoritatively 
and minutely, yet did not supply any sufficient power to 
keep it. Neither the law of nature, therefore, nor the law 
of Moses, availed to blind men to righteousness. So we 
come to the word which is the governing word of the 
Epistle to the Romans, — the word all. As the word 
righteousness is the governing word of St. Paul's entire 
* Rom., vii, 9. 



St. Paul and Protestantism. 5 1 

mind and life, so the word all is the governing word 
of -this his chief epistle. The Gentile with the law of 
nature, the Jew with the law of Moses, alike fail to 
achieve righteousness. ^ All have sinned, and come 
short of the glory of God.'^ All do what they would 
not, and do not what they would ; all feel themselves 
enslaved, impotent, guilty, miserable. 'O wretched 
man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of 
this death? '2 

Hitherto, we have followed Paul in the sphere of 
morals ; we have now come with him to the point where 
he enters the sphere of religion. Religion is that which 
binds and holds us to the practice of righteousness. We 
have accompanied Paul, and found him ahvays treading 
solid ground, till he is brought to straits where a binding 
and holding power of this kind is necessary. Here is 
the critical point for the scientific worth of his doctrine. 
' Now at last,' cries Puritanism, ^ the great apostle is 
about to become even as one of us ; there is no issue for 
him now, but the issue we have always declared he finds. 
He has recourse to our theurgy of election, justification, 
substitution, and imputed righteousness.' We will pro- 
ceed to show that Paul has recourse to nothing of the kind. 

' Rom., iii, 23. ^ Rom., vii, 24. 

E 2 



52 Sf. Paul and Protestantism. 



II 



We have seen how Puritanism seems to come by its 
religion in the first instance theologically and from 
authority ; Paul by his, on the other hand, psycho- 
logically and from experience. Even the points, there- 
fore, in which they both meet, they have not reached in 
the same order or by the same road. The miserable 
sense of sin from unrighteousness, the joyful witness 
of a good conscience from righteousness, these are 
points in which Puritanism and St. Paul meet. They 
are facts of human nature and can be verified by science. 
But whereas Puritanism, so far as science is concerned, 
ends with these facts, and rests the whole weight of its 
antecedent theurgy upon the witness to it they offer, Paul 
begins with these facts, and has not yet, so far as we 
have followed him, called upon them to prove anything 
but themselves. The scientific difference, as we have 



St. Paid and Protestantisjn. 5 3 

already remarked, which this establishes between Paul and 
Puritanism is immense, and is all in Paul's favour. Sin 
and righteousness, together with their eternal accom- 
paniments of fear and hope, misery and happiness, can 
prove themselves ; but they can by no means prove, 
also, Puritanism's history of original sin, election and 
justification. 

Puritanism is fond of maintaining, indeed, that Paul's 
doctrines derive their sanction, not from any agreement 
with science and experience, but from his miraculous 
conversion, and that this conversion it was which in 
his own judgment gave to them their authority. But 
whatever sanction the miracle of his conversion may in 
his own eyes have lent to the doctrines afterwards pro- 
pounded by Paul, it is clear that, for science, his 
conversion adds to his doctrines no force at all which 
they do not already possess in themselves. Paul's 
conversion is for science an event of precisely the same 
nature as the conversions of which the history of 
Methodism relates so many ; events described, for the 
most part, just as the event of Paul's conversion is 
described, with perfect good faith, and which we may 
perfectly admit to have happened just in the manner 
related, without on that account attributing to those 
who underwent them any source of certitude for a 



54 ^^- Paul and Protestantism. 

scheme of doctrine which this doctrine does not on 
other and better grounds possess. 

Surely this proposition has only to be clearly stated 
in order to be self-evident. . The conversion of Paul is 
in itself an incident of precisely the same order as the 
conversion of Sampson Staniforth, a Methodist soldier in 
the campaign of Fontenoy. Staniforth himself relates 
his conversion as follows, in words which bear plainly 
marked on them the very stamp of good faith : — 

' From twelve at night till two it was my turn to 
stand sentinel at a dangerous post. I had a fellow- 
sentinel, but I desired him to go away, which he 
willingly did. As soon as I was alone, I knelt down 
and determined not to rise, but to continue crying and 
wrestling with God till he had mercy on me. How 
long I was in that agony I cannot tell ; but as I looked 
up to heaven I saw the clouds open exceeding bright, 
and I saw Jesus hanging on the cross. At the same 
moment these words were applied to my heart : " Thy 
sins are forgiven thee." All guilt was gone, and my 
soul was filled with unutterable peace : the fear of death 
and hell was vanished away. I was filled with wonder 
and astonishment, I closed my eyes, but the impression 
was still the same ; and for about ten weeks, while I was 
awake, let me be where I would, the same appearance 



St. Paul and Protestantism. 5 5 

was still before my eyes, and the same impression upon 
my heart, Thy sins are forgiven thee! 

Not the narrative, in the Acts, of Paul's journey to 
Damascus, could more convince us, as we have said, 
of its own honesty. But this honesty makes nothing, 
as every one will admit, for the scientific truth of any 
scheme of doctrine propounded by Sampson Staniforth, 
which must prove itself and its own scientific value before 
science can admit it. Precisely the same is it with Paul's 
doctrine ; and we repeat, therefore, that he and his 
doctrine have herein a great advantage over Puritanism, 
in that, so far as we have yet followed them, they, unlike 
Puritanism, rely on facts of experience and assert nothing 
which science cannot verify. 

We have now to see whether Paul, in passing from 
the undoubted facts of experience, with which he begins, 
to his religion properly so called, abandons in any 
essential points of his teaching the advantage with which 
he started, and ends, as Puritanism commences, with a 
batch of arbitrary and unscientific assumptions. 

We left Paul in collision with a fact of human nature, 
but in itself a sterile fact, a fact on which it is possible 
to dwell too long, although Puritanism, thinking this 
impossible, has remained intensely absorbed in the con- 
templation of it, and indeed has never properly got 



5 6 St. Paul and Protestantism. 

beyond it, — the sense of sin. Sin is not a monster to 
be mused on, but an impotence to be got rid of. All 
thinking about it, beyond what is indispensable for the 
firm eftbrt to get rid of it, is waste of energy and waste 
of time. We then enter that element of morbid and 
subjective brooding, in which so many have perished. 
This sense of sin, however, it is also possible to have 
not strongly enough to beget the firm effort to get 
rid of it, and the Greeks, with all their great gifts, 
had this sense not strongly enough ; its strength in 
the Hebrew people is one of this people's mainsprings. 
And no Hebrew propliet or psalmist felt what sin 
was more powerfully than Paul. ' Mine iniquities 
have taken hold upon me so that I am not able to look 
up ; they are more than the hairs of mine head ; there- 
fore my heart faileth me.' ^ They are more than the 
hairs of mine head. The motions of what Paul calls ' the 
law in our members ' are indeed ahydrabrood ; when we 
are working against one fault, a dozen others crop up 
without our expecting it ; and this it is which drives the 
man who deals seriously with himself to difficulty, nay to 
despair. Paul did not need James to tell him that who- 
ever offends on one point is, so far at least as his own 
conscience and inward satisfaction are concerned, guilty 

1 Ps. Xl, 12. 



\ 



S^. Paul mid Protestantism. 57 

of all ;^ he knew it himself, and the unrest this know- 
ledge gave him was his very starting-point. He knew, 
too, that nothing outward, no satisfaction of all the 
requirements men may make of us, no privileges of any 
sort, can give peace of conscience ; — of conscience, 
' whose praise is not of men but of God.' ^ He knew, also, 
that the law of the moral order stretches beyond us and 
our private conscience, is independent of our sense 
of having kept it, and stands absolute and what in itself 
it is ; even, therefore, though I may know nothing against 
myself, yet this is not enough, I may still not be just.^ 
Finally, Paul knew that merely to know all this and say 
it, is of no use, advances us nothing ; ' the kingdom of 
God is not in word but in power.' ^ 

We have several times said that the Hebrew race 
apprehended God, — the universal order by which all 
things fulfil the law of their being, — chiefly as the moral 
order in human nature, and that it was their greatness 
that they apprehended him as this so distinctly and 
powerfully. But it is also characteristic of them, and 
perhaps it is what mainly distinguishes their spirit from 
the spirit of mediaeval Christianity, that they constantly 
'• thought, too, of God as the source of Hfe and breath and 

* James, ii, 10. ^ i C(?r., iv, 4, 

^ Ro7n., ii, 39; * Ibid., 20. 



58 St. Paul and Protestantism. 

all things, and of what they called ' fulness of life ' in 
all things. This way of thinking was common to them 
with the Greeks ; although, whereas the Greeks threw 
more deHcacy and imagination into it, the Hebrews threw 
more energy and vital warmth. But to the Hebrew, as 
to the Greek, the gift of life, and health, and the world, 
was divine, as well as the gift of morals. ' God's righteous- 
ness,' indeed, ' standeth like the strong mountains, his 
judgments are like the great deep ; he is a righteous judge, 
strong and patient, who is provoked every day.' ' This 
is the Hebrew's first and deepest conception of God, — 
as the source of the moral order. But God is also, to 
the Hebrew, ' our rock, which is higher than we,' the 
power by which we have been ' upholden ever since 
we were born,' that has ' fashioned us and laid his 
hand upon us ' and envelops us on every side, that has 
'■ made us fearfully and wonderfully,' and whose ' mercy 
is over all his works.' ^ He is the power that ' saves 
both man and beast, gives them drink of his pleasures 
as out of the river,' and with whom is ' the well of life.' ^ 
In his speech at Athens, Paul shows how full he, too, 
was of this feeling ; and in the famous passage in the 

* Ps. xxxvi, 6 ; vii, 1 1. 

2 Ps. Ixi, 2 ; Ixxi, 6 ; cxxxix, 5, 14 ; cxlv, 9, 

^ Ps. xxxvi, 6, 8, Q. 



Si. Paul and Protestantism. 59 

first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, where he 
asserts the existence of the natural moral law, the source 
he assigns to this law is not merely God in conscience, 
the righteous judge, but God in the world and the work- 
ings of the world, the eternal and divine power from 
which all hfe and wholesome energy proceed.^ 

This element in which we live and move and have 
our being, which stretches around and beyond the 
strictly moral element in us, around and beyond the 
finite sphere of what is originated, measured, and con- 
trolled by our own understanding and will, — this infinite 
element is very present to Paul's thoughts, and makes 
a profound impression on them. By this element we are 
receptive and influenced, not originative and influencing ; 
now, we all of us receive far more than we originate. 
Our pleasure from a spring day we do not make ; our 
pleasure, even, from an approving conscience we do not 
make. And yet we feel that both the one pleasure and 
the other can, and often do, work with us in a wonderful 
way for our good. So we get the thought of an im- 
pulsion outside ourselves which is at once awful and 
beneficent. ' No man,' as the Hebrew psalm says, 
'hath quickened his own soul.' ^ 'I know,' says 
Jeremiah, 'that the way of man is not in himself; it 
^ Rom., i, 19-21. - Fs. xxii, 29, 



6o St. Paul and Protestantism. 

is not in man that walketh to direct his steps.' ^ Most 
true and natural is this feeling; and the greater men 
are, the more natural is this feeling to them. Great 
men like Sylla and Napoleon have loved to attribute 
their success to their fortune, their star ; religious great 
men have loved to say that their sufficiency was of 
God. 2 But through every great spirit runs a train of 
feeling of this sort ; and the power and depth which there 
undoubtedly is in Calvinism, comes from Calvinism's 
being overwhelmed by it. Paul is not, like Calvinism, 
overwhelmed by it ; but it is always before his mind and 
strongly agitates his thoughts. The voluntary, rational, 
and human world, of righteousness, moral choice, effort, 
filled the first place in his spirit. But the necessary, 
mystical, and divine world, of influence, sympathy, 
emotion, filled the second ; and he could pass naturally 
from the one world to the other. The presence in 
Paul of this twofold feeling acted irresistibly upon his 
doctrine. What he calls ' the power that worketh in 
us,'^ and that produces results transcending all our 
expectatioDS and calculations, he instinctively sought 
to combine with our personal agencies of reason and 
conscience. 

Of such a mysterious power and its operation some 
J Jer., X, 23. 2 II Cor., iii, 5. ^ Eph., iii, 20. 



St. Paul and Protestantism. 6 1 

clear notion may be got by anybody who has ever had 
any overpowering attachment, or has been, according 
to the common expression, in love. Every one knows 
how being in love changes for the time a man's spiritual 
atmosphere, and makes animation and buoyancy where 
before there was flatness and dulness. One may even 
say that this is the reason why being in love is so popular 
with the whole human race, — because it relieves in so 
irresistible and deHghtful a manner the tedium or depres- 
sion of common-place human life. And not only does 
it change the atmosphere of our spirits, making air, 
light, and movement where before was stagnation and 
gloom, but it also sensibly and powerfully increases our 
faculties of action. It is matter of the commonest 
remark how a timid man who is in love will show 
courage, or an indolent man will show diligence. Nay, 
a timid man who would be only the more paralysed in 
a moment of danger by being told that it is his bounden 
duty as a man to show firmness, and that he must be 
ruined and disgraced for ever if he does not, will show 
firmness quite easily from being in love. An indolent 
man who shrinks back from vigorous effort only the 
more because he is told and knows that it is a man's 
business to show energy, and that it is shameful in him 
if he does not, will show energy quite easily from being 



62 St. Paul and Protestantism. 

in love. This, I say, we learn from the analogy of the 
most everyday experience ; — that a powerful attachment 
will give a man spirits and confidence which he could 
by no means call up or command of himself; and that 
in this mood he can do wonders which would not be 
possible to him without it. 

We have seen how Paul felt himself to be for the sake 
of righteousness apprehended^ to use his own expression, 
by Christ. ' I seek,' he says, ' to apprehend that for 
which also I am apprehended by Christ.' ' This for 
which he is thus apprehended is, — still to use his own 
words, — the righteons7zess of God ; not an incomplete and 
maimed righteousness, not a partial and unsatisfying 
establishment of the law of the spirit, dominant to-day, 
deposed to-morrow, effective at one or two points, failing 
in a hundred ; no, but an entire conformity at all points 
with the divine moral order, the will of God, and, in 
consequence, a sense of harmony with this order, of 
acceptance with God. 

In some points Paul had always served this order 
with a clear conscience. He did not steal, he did 
not commit adultery. But he was at the same time, 
he says himself, ' a blasphemer and a persecutor and an 
insulter,' ^ and the contemplation of Jesus Christ made 
• Philipp.^ iii, 12. 2 j Xim.^ i, 13. 



St. Paul and Protestantism. 53 

him see this, impressed it forcibly upon his mind. Here 
was his greatness, and the worth of his way of appropriat- 
ing Christ. We have seen how Calvinism, too, — Calvinism 
which has built itself upon St. Paul, — is a blasphemer, 
when it speaks of good works done by those who do not 
hold the Calvinist doctrine. There would need no great 
sensitiveness of conscience, one would think, to show 
that Calvinism has often been, also, a persecutor, and an 
insulter. Calvinism, as well as Paul, professes to study 
Jesus Christ. But the difference between Paul's study of 
Christ and Calvinism's is this : that Paul by studying 
Christ got to know himself clearly, and to transform his 
narrow conception of righteousness ; while Calvinism 
studies both Christ and Paul after him to no such good 
purpose. 

These, however, are but the veriest rudiments of the 
history of Paul's gain from Jesus Christ, as the particular 
impression mentioned is but the veriest fragment of the 
total impression produced by the contemplation of Christ 
upon him. The sum and substance of that total impres- 
sion may best be conveyed by two words, — without sin. 

We must here revert to what we have already said of 
the importance, for sound criticism of a man's ideas, of 
the order in which his ideas come. For us, who 
approach Christianity through a scholastic theology, it 



64 St. Paul and Protestantism. 

is Christ's divinity which establishes his being without 
sin. For Paul, who approached Christianity through his 
personal experience, it was Jesus Christ's being without 
sin which establishes his divinity. The large and com- 
plete conception of righteousness to which he himself 
had slowly and late, and only by Jesus Christ's help, 
awakened, in Jesus he seemed to see existing absolutely 
and naturally. The devotion to this conception which 
made it meat and drink to carry it into effect, a devotion 
of which he himself was strongly and deeply conscious, 
he saw in Jesus still stronger, by far, and deeper than in 
himself. But for attaining the righteousness of God, for 
reaching an absolute conformity with the moral order 
and with God's will, he saw no such impotence existing 
in Jesus Christ's case as in his own. For Jesus, the un- 
certain conflict between the law in our members and the 
law of the spirit did not appear to exist. Those eternal 
vicissitudes of victory and defeat, which drove Paul to 
despair, in Jesus were absent. Smoothly and inevitably 
he followed the real ^nd eternal order, in preference to 
the momentary and apparent order. Obstacles outside 
him there were plenty, but obstacles within him there 
were none. He was led by the spirit of God ; he was 
dead to sin, he Hved to God ; and in this life to God he 
persevered even to the cruel bodily death of the cross. As 



St. Paul and Protestantism. 65 

many as are led by the spirit of God, says Paul, are the 
sons of God.^ If this is so with even us, who hve to 
God so feebly and who render such an imperfect obedi- 
ence, how much more is he who lives to God entirely 
and who renders an unalterable obedience, the unique 
and only Son of God ? 

This is undoubtedly the main line of movement 
which Paul's ideas respecting Jesus Christ follow. He 
had been trained, however, in the scholastic theology 
of Judaism, just as we are trained in the scholastic 
theology of Christianity; would that we were as little 
embarrassed with our training as he was with his ! The 
Jewish theological doctrine respecting the eternal word 
or wisdom of God, which was with God from the begin- 
ning before the oldest of his works, and through which 
the world was created, this doctrine, which appears in 
the Book of Proverbs and again in the Book of Wisdom,^ 
Paul apphed to Jesus Christ, and in the Epistle to the 
Colossians there is a remarkable passage^ with clear signs 
of his thus applying it. But then this metaphysical and 
theological basis to the historic being of Jesus is some- 
thing added by Paul from outside to his own essential 
ideas concerning him, something which fitted them and 

^ Rom.^ viii, 14. ^ Prov., viii, 22-31 ; and Wisd., vii, 25-27. 

3 Col, i, 15-17. 



66 St. Paul ajid Protestantism.. 

was naturally taken on to them ; it is secondary, it is not 
an original part of his system, much less the ground of it. 
It fills a very different place in his system from the place 
which it fills in the system of the author of the Fourth 
Gospel, who takes his starting-point from it. Paul's 
starting-point, it cannot be too often repeated, is the idea 
of righteousness ; and his concern with Jesus is as the 
clue to righteousness, not as the clue to transcendental 
ontology. Speculations in this region had no overpower- 
ing attraction for Paul, notwithstanding the traces of an 
acquaintance with them which we find in his writings, 
and notwithstanding the great activity of his intellect. 
This activity threw itself with an unerring instinct into a 
sphere where, with whatever travail and through whatever 
impediments to clear expression, directly practical religious 
results might yet be won, and not into any sphere of 
abstract speculation. 

Much more visible and important than his identifica- 
tion of Jesus with the divine hypostasis known as the 
Logos, is Paul's identification of him with the Messiah. 
Ever present is his recognition of him as the Messiah to 
whom all the law and prophets pointed, of whom the 
heart of the Jewish race was full, and on whom the 
Jewish instructors of Paul's youth had dwelt abundantly. 
The Jewish language and ideas respecting the end of the 



Sl Paul and Protestantism. 6y 

world and the Messiah's kingdom, his day, his presence, 
his appearing, his glory, Paul applied to Jesus, and con- 
stantly used. Of the force and reaHty which these ideas 
and expressions had for him there can be no question ; 
as to his use of them, only two remarks are needed. One 
is, that in him these Jewish ideas, — as any one will feel 
who calls to mind a genuine display of them like that in 
the Apocalypse, — are spiritualised ; and as he advances 
in his course they are spiritualised increasingly. The 
other remark is, that important as these ideas are in 
Paul, of them, too, the importance is only secondary, 
compared with t!iat of the great central matter of his 
thoughts : the I'lghteousness of God, the non-fulfil7nent of it 
by ma7i, the fulfilment of it by Christ. 

Once more we are led to a result favourable to the 
scientific value of Paul's teaching. That Jesus Christ 
was the divine Logos, the second person of the Trinity, 
science can neither deny nor affirm. That he was the 
Jewish Messiah, who will some day appear in the sky 
with the sound of trumpets, to put an end to the actual 
kingdoms of the world and to establish his own kingdom, 
science can neither deny nor affirm. The very terms of 
which these propositions are composed are such as science 
is unable to handle. But that the Jesus of the 
Bible follows the universal moral order and the will of 



68 St Paul and Protestantism. 

God, without being let and hindered as we are by the 
motions of private passion and by self-will, this is evident 
to whoever can read the Bible with open eyes. It is just 
what any criticism of the Gospel-history, which sees that 
history as it really is, tells us ; it is the scientific result of 
that history. And this is the result which pre-eminently 
occupies Paul. Of Christ's life and death, the all-im • 
portance for us, according to Paul, is that by means of 
them, ' denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should 
live soberly, righteously, and godly ;' should be enabled 
to 'bear fruit to God' in 'love, joy, peace, long-suffer- 
ing, kindness, goodness, faith, mildness, self-control.' ^ 
Of Christ's life and death the scope was ' to redeem us 
from all iniquity, and make us purely zealous for good 
works.' 2 Paul says by way of preface, that we are to live 
thus in the actual world which now is, ' with the expect- 
ation of the appearing of the glory of God and Christ.'^ 
By nature and habit, and with his full beHef that the end 
of the world was nigh at hand, Paul used these words 
to mean a Messianic coming and kingdom. Later 
Christianity has transferred them, as it has transferred so 
much else of Paul's, to a life beyond the grave, but it has 
by no means spiritualised them. Paul, as his spiritual 

' Tit., ii, 12; Rovi., vii, 4; Gal., v, 22, 23. 
2 Tit., ii, 14. '^ Ibid., 13. 



vS/. Paul and Protestantism. 69 

growth advanced, spiritualised them more and more ; he 
came to think, in using them, more and more of a 
gradual inward transformation of the world by a confor- 
mity like Christ's to the will of God, than of a Messianic 
advent. Yet even then they are always second with him, 
and not first ; the essence of saving grace is always to 
make us righteous, to bring us into conformity with the 
divine law, to enable us to ' bear fruit to God/ 

'Jesus Christ gave himself for us that he might redeem 
us from iniquity.' First of all, he rendered an unbroken 
obedience to the law of the spirit; he served the spirit 
of God ; he came, not to do his own will, but the will of 
God. Now, the law of the spirit makes men one ; it is only 
by the law in our members that we are many. Secondly, 
therefore, Jesus Christ had an unfailing sense of what 
we have called, using an expressive modern term, the 
solidarity of men : that it was not God's will that one of 
his human creatures should perish. Thirdly, Jesus 
Christ persevered in this uninterrupted obedience to the 
law of the spirit, in this unfailing sense of human solidarity, 
even to the death ; though everything befell him which 
might break the one or tire out the other. Lastly, he 
had in himself, in all he said and did, that ineffable force 
of attraction which doubled the virtue of everything said 
or done by him. 



70 St. Paid and Protestantism. 

If ever there was a case in which the wonder-working 
power of attachment, in a man for whom the moral 
sympathies and the desire of righteousness were all- 
powerful, might employ itself and work its wonders, 
it was here. Paul felt this power penetrate him ; and 
he felt, also, how by perfectly identifying himself 
through it with Jesus, and in no other way, could 
he ever get the confidence and the force to do as 
Jesus did. He thus found a point in which the 
mighty world outside man, and the weak world inside 
him, seemed to combine for his salvation. The struggHng 
stream of duty, which had not volume enough to bear 
him to his goal, was suddenly reinforced by the immense 
tidal wave of sympathy and emotion. 

To this new and potent influence Paul gave the name 
of faith. More fully he calls it : ' Faith that worketh 
through love.' ^ The word faith points, no doubt, to 
' coming by hearing,' and has possibly a reminiscence, for 
Paul, of his not having with his own waking eyes, like the 
original disciples, seen Jesus, and of his special mission 
being to Gentiles who had not seen Jesus either. But 
the essential meaning of the word is ' power of holding on 
to the unseen,' 'fidelity.' Other attachments demand 
fidelity in absence to an object which, at some time or 
1 Gal., V, 6. 



St. Paul and Protestantism. 7 1 

other, nevertheless, has been seen ; this attachment de- 
mands fidelity to an object which both is absent and has 
never been seen by us. It is therefore rightly called not 
constancy, but faith j a power, pre-eminentfy, oi holding fast 
to an unseen power of good7iess. Identifying ourselves with 
Jesus Christ through this attachment we become as he was. 
We live with his thoughts and feelings, and we participate, 
therefore, in his freedom from the ruinous law in our 
members, in his obedience to the saving law of the spirit, 
in his conformity to the eternal order, in the joy and 
peace of his life to God. 'The law of the spirit of 
life in Christ Jesus,' says Paul, 'freed me from the 
law of sin and death.' ^ This is what is done for us 
\>y faith. 

It is evident that some difficulty arises out of Paul's 
adding to the general sense of the word faith,— <2 holding 
fast to an unseen power of good?iess, — a particular sense 
of his own, — identification with Christ. It will at once 
appear that this faith of Paul's is in truth a specific form 
of holding fast to an unseen power of goodness ; and 
that while it can properly be said of Abraham, for in- 
stance, that he was justified by faith, if we take faith in 
its plain sense of holding fast to an unseen power of 
goodness, yet it cannot without difficulty and recourse 

^ Rom., viii, 2. 



72 St. Paul and Protestantism. 

to a strained figure be said of him, if we take faith in 
Paul's specific sense of identification with Christ. Paul 
however, undoubtedly, having conveyed his new specific 
sense into the word faith, still uses the word in all cases 
where, without this specific sense, it was before applicable 
and usual ; and in this way he often creates ambiguity. 
Why, it may be asked, does Paul, instead of employing 
a special term to denote his special meaning, still thus 
employ the general term faith ? We are inclined to 
think it was from that desire to get for his words and 
thoughts not only the real but also the apparent sanction 
and consecration of the Hebrew Scriptures, which we 
have called his tendency to Judaise. It was written of 
the founder of Israel, Abraham, that he believed God 
and it was counted to him for righteousness. The prophet 
Habakkuk had the famous text : ' The just shall live by 
faith.' ^ Jesus, too, had used and sanctioned the use of 
the word faith to signify cleaving to the unseen God's 
power of goodness as shown in Christ.^ Peter and John 
and the other apostles habitually used the word in the 
same sense, with the modification introduced by Christ's 
departure. This was enough to make Paul retain for that 
vital operation, which was the heart of his whole religious 
system, the name of faith, though he had consider- 
■ Gen.^ XV, 6 ; Habakkuk, ii, 4. ^ Mark, xi, 22. 



St. Paul and Protestantism. 73 

ably developed and enlarged the name's usual meaning. 
Fraught with this new and developed sense, the term does 
not always quite well suit the cases to which it was in its 
old sense, with perfect propriety, applied ; this, however, 
Paul did not regard. The term applied with undeniable 
truth, though not with perfect adequacy, to the great 
spiritual operation whereto he affixed it ; and it was at 
the same time the name given to the crowning grace 
of the great father of the Jewish nation, Abraham ; it 
was the prophet Habakkuk's talismanic and consecrated 
term, faith. 

In this word faith^ as used by St. Paul,^ we reach a 
point round which the ceaseless stream of religious expo- 
sition and discussion has for ages circled. Even for 
those who misconceive Paul's line of ideas most com- 
pletely, faith is so evidently the central point in his 
system that their thoughts cannot but centre upon it. 
Puritanism, as is well known, has talked of little else but 
faith. And the word is of such a nature, that, the true 
clue once lost which Paul has given us to its meaning, 
every man may put into it almost anything he likes, all 

' With secondary uses of the word, such as its xise with the 
article, 'M^ faith,' in expressions like 'the words of the faith,' to 
signif)^ the body of tenets and principles received by believers 
from the apostle, we need not here concern ourselves. They present 
no difficulty. 



74 -^'^- Pciul mid Protestantism. 

the fancies of his superstition or of his fanaticism. To 
say, therefore, that to have faith in Christ means to be 
attached to Christ, to embrace Christ, to be identified 
with Christ, is not enough ; the question is, to be at- 
tached to him how, to embrace him how 1 

A favourite expression of popular theology con- 
veys perfectly the popular definition of faith : to rest in the 
finished work of the Saviour. In the scientific language 
of Protestant theology, to embrace Christ, to have saving 
faith, is ' to give our consent heartily to the covenant 
of grace, and so to receive the benefit of justification, 
whereby God pardons all our sins and accepts us as 
righteous for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us.' 
This is mere theurgy, in which, so far as we have yet 
gone, we have not found Paul dealing. Wesley, with 
his genius for godliness, struggled all his life for some 
deeper and more edifying account of that faith, which he 
felt working wonders in his own soul, than that it was a 
hearty consent to the covenant of grace and an accept- 
ance of the benefit of Christ's imputed righteousness. 
Yet this amiable and gracious spirit, but intellectually 
slight and shallow compared to Paul, beat his wings in 
vain. Paul, nevertheless, had solved the problem for 
him, if only he could have had eyes to see Paul's solu- 
tion. 



St. Paul and Protestantism. 75 

'■ He that believes in Christ/ says Wesley, ' discerns 
spiritual things : he is enabled to taste, see, hear, and 
feel God.' There is nothing practical and soHd here. 
A company of Cornish revivalists will have no difficulty 
in tasting, seeing, hearing, and feeling God, twenty times 
over, to-night, and yet may be none the better for it 
to-morrow morning. When Paul said. In Christ Jesus 
neither cirmmcision availeth a7iything nor uncircimicision., 
but faith that worketh through love; Have faith in Christ / 
these words did not mean for him : ' Give your hearty 
belief and consent to the covenant of grace ; Accept the 
offered benefit of justification through Christ's imputed 
righteousness.' They did not mean : ' Try and discern 
spiritual things, try and taste, see, hear, and feel God.' 
They did not mean : ' Rest in the finished work of Christ 
the Saviour.' No, they meant : Die with him ! 

The object of this treatise is not religious edification, 
but the true criticism of a great and misunderstood 
author. Yet it is impossible to be in presence of this 
Pauline conception of faith without remarking on the 
incomparable power of edification which it contains. It 
is indeed a crowning evidence of that piercing practical 
religious sense which we have attributed to Paul. It is 
at once mystical and rational ; and it enlists in its service 
the best forces of both worlds,— the world of reason and 



76 St. Paul and Protestantism. 

morals, and the world of sympathy and emotion. The 
world of reason and duty has an excellent clue to action, 
but wants motive-power ; the world of sympathy and 
influence has an irresistible force of motive-power, but 
wants a clue for directing its exertion. The danger of 
the one world is weariness in well-doing ; the danger 
of the other is sterile raptures and immoral fanaticism. 
Paul takes from both worlds what can help him, and 
leaves what cannot. The elemental power of sympathy 
and emotion in us, a power which extends beyond the 
limits of our own will and conscious activity, which we 
cannot measure and control, and which in each of us 
differs immensely in force, volume, and mode of manifesta- 
tion, he calls into full play, and sets it to work with all its 
strength and in all its variety. But one unalterable object 
is assigned by him to this power : to die with Christ to the 
law of the flesh, to live with Christ to the law of the mind. 
This is the doctrine of the necrosis^ — Paul's central 
doctrine, and the doctrine which makes his profoundness 
and originality. His repeated and minute lists of practices 
and feehngs to be followed or suppressed, now take a 
heightened significance. They were the matter by which 
his faith tried itself and knew itself. Those multitudinous 
motions of appetite and self-will which reason and con- 
' II Cor., iv, 10. 



t 



St. Paid and Protestantism. 77 

science disapproved, reason and conscience could yet not 
govern, and had to yield to them. This, as we have 
seen, is what drove Paul almost to despair. Well, then, 
how did Paul's faith, working through love, help him 
here ? It enabled him to reinforce duty by affection. 
In the central need of his nature, the desire to govern 
these motions of unrighteousness, it enabled him to say : 
Die to them ! Christ did. If any man be in Christ, said 
Paul — that is, if any man identifies himself with Christ 
by attachment so that he enters into his feelings and 
lives with his life, — he is anew creature ;^ he can do, and 
does, what Christ did.- First, he suffers with him. Christ 
throughout his life and in his death presented his body 
a living sacrifice to God; every self-willed impulse blindly 
trying to assert itself without respect of the universal 
order, he died to. You, says Paul to his disciple, are 
to do the same. Never mind how various and multi- 
tudinous the impulses are ; impulses to intemperance, 
concupiscence, covetousness, pride, sloth, envy, malignity, 
anger, clamour, bitterness, harshness, unmercifulness. 
Die to them all, and to each as it comes ! Christ did. 
If you cannot, your attachment, your faith, must be one 
that goes but a very little way. In an ordinary human 
attachment, out of love to a woman, out of love to a 
^ II Cor., V, 17. 



yS St. Paul and Protestantism. 

friend, out of love to a child, you can suppress quite 
easily, because by sympathy you enter into their feelings, 
this or that impulse of selfishness which happens to 
conflict with them, and which hitherto you have obeyed. 
All impulses of selfishness conflict with Christ's feelings, 
he showed it by dying to them all ; if you are one with 
him by faith and sympathy, you can die to them also. 
Then, secondly, if you thus die with him, you become 
transformed by the renewing of your mind, and rise 
with him. The law of the spirit of life which is in 
Christ becomes the law of your hfe also, and frees you 
from the law of sin and death. You rise with him to 
that harmonious conformity with the real and eternal 
order, that sense of pleasing God who trieth the hearts, 
which is life and peace, and which grows more and 
more till it becomes glory. If you suffer with him, 
therefore, you shall also be glorified with him. 

The real worth of this mystical conception depends on 
the fitness of the character and history of Jesus Christ for 
inspiring such an enthusiasm of attachment and devotion 
as that which Paul's notion of faith implies. If the 
character and history are eminently such as to inspire it, 
then Paul has no doubt found a mighty aid towards the 
attainment of that righteousness of which Jesus Christ's 
life afforded the admirable pattern. A great solicitude is 



St. Paul and Protestantism. 79 

always shown by popular Christianity to establish a 
radical difference between Jesus and a teacher like 
Socrates. Ordinary theologians establish this difference 
by transcendental distinctions into which science cannot 
follow them. But what makes for science the radical 
difference between Jesus and Socrates, is that such a 
conception as Paul's would, if applied to Socrates, be out 
of place and ineffective. Socrates inspired boundless 
friendship and esteem ; but the inspiration of reason 
and conscience is the one inspiration which comes from 
him, and which impels us to live righteously as he did. 
A penetrating enthusiasm of love, sympathy, pity, adora- 
tion, reinforcing the inspiration of reason and duty, does 
not belong to Socrates. With Jesus it is different. On 
this point it is needless to argue ; history has proved. 
In the midst of errors the most prosaic, the most 
immoral, the most unscriptural, concerning God, Christ, 
and righteousness, the immense emotion of love and 
sympathy inspired by the person and character of Jesus 
has had to work almost by itself alone for righteousness ; 
and it has worked wonders. The surpassing religious 
grandeur of Paul's conception of faith is that it seizes 
a real salutary emotional force of incalculable magnitude, 
and reinforces moral effort with it. 

Paul's mystical conception is not complete without its 



8o St. Paid and Protestantism. 

relation of us to our fellow-men, as well as its relation of 
us to Jesus Christ. Whoever identifies himself with 
Christ, identifies himself with Christ's idea of the solida- 
rity of men. The whole race is conceived as one body, 
having to die and rise with Christ, and forming by the 
joint action of its regenerate members the mystical body 
of Christ. Hence the truth of that which Bishop Wilson 
says : ' It is not so much our neighbour's interest as our 
own that we love him.' Jesus Christ's life, with which we 
by faith identify ourselves, is not complete, his aspiration 
after the eternal order is not satisfied, so long as only 
Jesus himself follows this order, or only this or that 
individual amongst us men follows it. The same law 
of emotion and sympathy, therefore, which prevails in 
our inward self-discipline, is to prevail in our dealings 
with others. The motions of sin in ourselves we succeed 
in mortifying, not by saying to ourselves that they are 
sinful, but by sympathy with Christ in his mortification of 
them. In like manner, our duties towards our neighbour 
we perform, not in deference to external commands and 
prohibitions, but through identifying ourselves with him 
by sympathy with Christ who identified himself with him. 
Therefore, we owe no man anything but to love one 
another ; and he who loves his neighbour fulfils the law 



St. Paul a7td Protestantism. 8 1 

towards him, because he seeks to do him good and for- 
bears to do him harm just as if he was himself 

Mr. Lecky cannot see that the command to speak 
the truth to one's neighbour is a command which has a 
natural sanction. But according to these Pauline ideas 
it has a clear natural sanction. For, if my neighbour is 
merely an extension of myself, deceiving my neighbour 
is the same as deceiving myself; and than self-deceit 
there is nothing by nature more baneful. And on this 
ground Paul puts the injunction. He says : ' Speak every 
man truth to his neighbour, for we are members one of 
another.'^ This direction to identify ourselves in Jesus 
Christ with our neighbours is hard and startling, no doubt, 
like the direction to identify ourselves with Jesus and die 
with him. But it is also, like that direction, inspiring ; 
and not, like a set of mere mechanical commands and 
prohibitions, lifeless and unaiding. It shows a profound 
practical religious sense, and rests upon facts of human 
nature which experience can follow and appreciate. 

The three essential terms of Pauline theology are not, 
therefore, as popular theology makes them : calling, 
justification, sanctification. They are rather these : dying 
with Christ, resurrection from the dead, growing into 

' Eph., iv, 25. 

G 



82 S^. Paul and Protestantism. 

Christ.^ The order in which these terms are placed 
indicates, what we have already pointed out elsewhere, 
the true Pauline sense of the expression, resiirredwi 
fro7fi the dead. In Paul's ideas the expression has no 
essential connexion with physical death. It is true, 
popular theology connects it with this almost exclusively, 
and regards any other use of it as purely figurative and 
secondary. For popular theology, Christ's resurrection 
is his bodily resurrection on earth after his physical death 
on the cross ; the believer's resurrection is his bodily 
resurrection in a future world, the golden city of our 
hymns and of the Apocalypse. For this theology, the 
force of Christ's resurrection is that it is a miracle which 
guarantees the promised future miracle of our own 
resurrection. It is a common remark with Biblical 
critics, even with able and candid Biblical critics, that 
Christ's resurrection, in this sense of a physical miracle, 
is the central object of Paul's thoughts and the founda- 
tion of all his theology. Nay, the preoccupation with 
this idea has altered the very text of our documents ; so 
that whereas Paul wrote, ' Christ died and lived,' we 
read, 'Christ died and rose again and revived.' ^ But 

' aTro6ave7u crvv Xpicrr^, Col. , ii, 20 ; i^avdcrTacis e/c veKpcov, 
Philipp.., iii, II ; av^r)(ns els Xpiardu, Eph., iv, 15. 
2 Rom., xiv, 9. 



St. Paul and Protestantism. '^7^ 

whoever has carefully followed Paul's line of thought as 
we have endeavoured to trace it, will see that in his 
mature theology, as the Epistle to the Romans exhibits 
it, it cannot be this physical and miraculous aspect of 
the resurrection which holds the first place in his mind ; 
for under this aspect the resurrection does not fit in with 
the ideas which he is developing. 

Not for a moment do we deny that in PauFs earlier 
theology, and notably in the Epistles to the Thessalonians 
and Corinthians, the physical and miraculous aspect of 
the resurrection, both Christ's and the believer's, is 
primary and predominant. Not for a moment do we 
deny that to the very end of his life, after the Epistle to 
the Romans, after the Epistle to the Philippians, if he 
had been asked whether he held the doctrine of the re- 
surrection in the physical and miraculous sense, as well 
as in his own spiritual and mystical sense, he would have 
replied with entire conviction that he did. Very likely 
it would have been impossible to him to imagine his 
theology without it. But : — 

Below the surface-stream, shallow and light, 
Of what we say we feel — below the stream, 
As light, of what we think we feel — there flows 
With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep, 
The central stream of what we feel indeed ; 
G 2 



84 St. Paid and Protestantism. 

and by this alone are we truly characterised. Paul's 
originality lies in the effort to find a moral side and 
significance for all the processes, however mystical, of 
the religious life, with a view of strengthening, in this 
way, their hold upon us and their command of all our 
nature. Sooner or later he was sure to be drawn to treat 
the process of resurrection with this endeavour. He did 
so treat it ; and what is original and essential in him is 
his doing so. 

Paul's conception of life and death inevitably came 
to govern his conception of resurrection. What indeed, 
as we have seen, is for Paul life, and what is death? 
Not the ordinary physical life and death. Death, for 
him, is living after the flesh, obedience to sin; life is 
mortifying by the spirit the deeds of the flesh, obedience 
to righteousness. Resurrection, in its essential sense, 
is therefore for Paul, the rising, within the sphere of our 
visible earthly existence, from death in this sen^e to life 
in this sense. It is indubitable that, so far as the human 
behever's resurrection is concerned, this is so. Else, how 
could Paul say to the Colossians (to take only one out 
of a hundred clear texts showing the same thing) : ' If 
ye then be risen with Christ, seek the things that are 
above.' ^ But when Paul repeats again and again, in the 
1 Col., iii, I. 



Sf. Paid and Protestantism. 85 

Epistle to the Romans, that the matter of our faith is 
' that God raised Jesus from the dead/ the essential 
meaning of this resurrection, also, is just the same. Real 
life for Paul, begins with the mystical death which frees us 
from the dominion of the external shads and shad nots of 
the law.^ From the moment, therefore, that Jesus Christ 
was content to do God's will, he died. Paul's point is, 
that Jesus Christ in his earthly existence obeyed the law 
of the spirit and bore fruit to God ; and that the believer 
should, in his earthly existence, do the same. That 
Christ ' died to sin,' that he ' pleased not himself,' and 
that, consequently, through all his life here, he was risen 
and living to God, is what occupies Paul. Christ's 
physical resurrection after he was crucified is neither in 
point of time nor in point of character the resurrection 
on which Paul, following his essential line of thought, 
wanted to fix the beHever's mind. The resurrection 
Paul was striving after for himself and others was a resur- 
rection 710W, and a resurrection to righteousness!^ 

* See Rojji., vii, 1-6. 

^ It has been said that this was the error of Hymenaeus and 
Philetas (ll Tim., ii, 17). It might be rejoined, with much plausi- 
bility, that their error was the error of popular theology, the fixing 
the attention on the past miracle of Christ's physical resurrection, 
and losing sight of the continuing miiacle of the Christian's 
spiritual resurrection. Probably, however, Hymengeus and Philetas 



86 St. Paul and Protestantism. 

But Jesus Christ's obeying God and not pleasing him- 
self culminated in his death on the cross. All through 
his career, indeed, Jesus Christ pleased not himself and 
died to sin. But so smoothly and so inevitably, as we 
have before said, did he always appear to follow that law 
of the moral order, which to us it costs such effort to 
obey, that only in th^ very wrench and pressure of his 
violent death did any pain of dying, any conflict between 
the law of the flesh and the law of the spirit, in Christ 
become visible. But the Christian needs to find in 
Christ's dying to sin a fellowship of suffering and a con- 
formity of death. Well, then, the point of Christ's trial 
and crucifixion is the only point in his career where the 
Christian can palpably touch what he seeks. In all 
dying there is struggle and weakness ; in our dying to 
sin there is great struggle and weakness. But only in his 
crucifixion can we see, in Jesus Christ, a place for struggle 
and weakness.^ That self-sacrificing obedience of Jesus 

controverted some of Paul's tenets respecting the approaching 
Messianic advent and the resurrection then to take place (i Thess., 
iv, 1 3-1 7). If they rejected these tenets, they were right where 
Paul was wrong. But if they disputed and separated on 
account of them, they were heretics ; that is, they had their 
hearts and minds full of a speculative contention, instead of their 
proper chief-concern, — putting on the new man, and the imitation 
of Christ. 

• io-Tavpcvdn e| dadcftias, II Cor. , xiii, 4. 



St. Paul and Protestantism. 8y 

Christ's whole life, which was summed up in this great, 
final act of his crucifixion, and which is palpable as 
sacrifice, obedience, dolorous effort, only there, is, there- 
fore, constantly regarded by Paul under the figure of this 
final act, as is also the believer's conformity to Christ's 
obedience. The believer is crucified with Christ when 
he mortifies by the spirit the deeds of unrighteousness ; 
Christ was crucified when he pleased not himself, and 
came to do not his own will but God's. 

It is the same with life as with death ; it turns on no 
physical event, but on that central concern of Paul's 
thoughts, righteousness. If we have the spirit of Christ, 
we live, as he did, by the spirit, ' serve the spirit of God,'^ 
and follow the eternal order. The spirit of God, the 
spirit of Christ is the same, — the one eternal moral order. 
If we are led by the spirit of God we are the sons of God, 
and share with Christ the heritage of the sons of God, — 
eternal life, peace, felicity, glory. The spirit, therefore, 
is life because of righteousness. And when, through identi- 
fying ourselves with Christ, we reach Christ's righteous- 
ness, then eternal life begins for us ; — a continuous and 
ascending fife, for the eternal order never dies, and the 
more we transform ourselves into servants of righteous- 
ness and organs of the eternal order, the more we are 

' According to the true reading in Philipp.^ iii, 3. 



88 5/. Paul and Protestantism. 

and desire to be this eternal order and nothing else. 
Even in this life we are ' seated in heavenly places,' ^ as 
Christ is ; so entirely, for Paul, is righteousness the true 
life and the true heaven. But the transformation cannot 
be completed here ; the physical death is regarded by 
Paul as a stage at which it ceases to be impeded. How- 
ever, at this stage we quit, as he himself says, the ground 
of experience and enter upon the ground of hope. But, 
by a sublime analogy, he fetches from the travail of the 
whole universe proof of the necessity and beneficence of 
the law of transformation. Jesus Christ entered into his 
glory when he had made his physical death itself a crown- 
ing witness to his obedience to righteousness ; we, in like 
manner, within the limits of this earthly life and before 
we have yet persevered to the end, must not look for 
full adoption, for the glorious revelation in us of the sons 
ofGod.2 

That Paul, as we have said, accepted the physical 
miracle of Christ's resurrection and ascension as a part of 
the signs and wonders which accompanied Christianity, 
there can be no doubt. Just in the same manner he 
accepted the eschatology, as it is called, of his nation, — 
their doctrine of the final things and of the summons by 
a trumpet in the sky to judgment; he accepted Satan, 
1 Eph., ii, 6. 2 Ro„i_^ viii, 18-25. 



Sf. Paid and Protestantism. 89 

hierarchies of angels, and an approaching end of the 
world. What we deny is, that his acceptance of the 
former gives to his teaching its essential characters, any 
more than his acceptance of the latter. We should but 
be continuing, with strict logical development, Paul's 
essential hne of thought, if we said that the true ascen- 
sion and glorified reign of Christ was the triumph and 
reign of his spirit, of his real life, far more operative after 
his death on the cross than before it ; and that in this 
sense, most truly, he and all who persevere to the end as 
he did are ' sown in weakness but raised in power.' 
Paul himself, however, did not distinctly continue his 
thought thus, and neither will we do so for him. How 
far Paul himself knew that he had gone in his irresistible 
bent to find, for each of the data of his religion, that 
side of moral and spiritual significance which, as a mere 
sign and wonder, it had not and could not have, — what 
data he himself was conscious of having transferred, 
through following this bent, from the first rank in im- 
portance to the second, — we cannot know with any 
certainty. That the bent existed, that Paul felt it existed, 
and that it establishes a wide difference between the 
earliest epistles and the latest, is beyond question. 
Already, in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, he 
declares that, 'though he had known Christ after the 



90 St. Paul mid Protestantism. 

flesh, yet henceforth he knew him so no more ;'^ and in 
the Epistle to the Romans, shortly afterwards, he rejects 
the notion of dwelling on the miraculous Christ, on the 
descent into hell and on the ascent into heaven, and fixes 
the believer's attention solely on the faith of Christ and 
on the effects produced by an acquaintance with it.^ In 
the same Epistle, in like manner, the kingdom of God, of 
which to the Thessalonians he described the advent in such 
materialising and popularly Judaic language, has become 
'■ righteousness, and peace, and joy in the holy spirit.'^ 

These ideas, we repeat, may never have excluded 
others, which absorbed the most part of Paul's contem- 
poraries as they absorb popular religion at this day. To 
popular religion, the real kingdom of God is the New 
Jerusalem with its jaspers and emeralds ; righteousness 
and peace and joy are only the kingdom of God figura- 
tively. The real sitting in heavenly places is the sitting 
on thrones in a land of pure delight after we are dead ; 
serving the spirit of God is only sitting in heavenly 
places figuratively. Science exactly reverses this process. 
For science, the spiritual notion is the real one, the mate- 
rial notion is figurative. The astonishing greatness of 
Paul is, that, coming when and where and whence he did, 

^ II Cor.^ V, 1 6. 
Roj?t., X, 6-IO. ' Rom., xiv, 17. 



St. Paid and Protestantism. 91 

he yet grasped the spiritual notion, if not exdusively and 
fully, yet firmly and predominantly ; more and more pre- 
dominantly through all the last years of his life. And 
what makes him original and himself, is not what he 
shares with his contemporaries and with modern popular 
religion, but this which he develops of his own ; and this 
which he develops of his own is just of a nature to make 
his religion a theology instead of a theurgy, and at bottom 
a scientific instead of a non-scientific structure. ' Die and 
come to life ! ' says Goethe, — an unsuspected witness, 
assuredly, to the psychological and scientific profound- 
ness of Paul's conception of life and death : — ' Die and 
come to life ! for, so long as this is not accomplished, thou 
art but a troubled guest upon an earth of gloom.' ^ 

The three cardinal points in Paul's theology are not 
therefore, we repeat, those commonly assigned by Puri- 
tanism, calling., justiJicatio7i, sanctification ; but they are 
these: dying with Christ, resurrection from the dead., grow- 
ing into Christ. And we will venture, moreover, to affirm 
that the more the Epistle to the Romans is read and re-read 
with a clear mind, the more will the conviction strengthen, 

* Stirb und werde ! 
Denn so lang du das nicht hast, 
Bist du nur ein triiber Gast 
Auf der dunkeln Erde. 



92 St. Paul and Protestantism. 

that the sense indicated by the order in which we here 
class the second main term of Paul's conception, is the 
essential sense which Paul himself attaches to this term, 
in every single place where in that Epistle he has used it. 
Not tradition and not theory, but a simple impartial 
study of the development of Paul's central line of 
thought, brings us to the conclusion, that from the very 
outset of the Epistle, where Paul speaks of Christ as 
' declared to be the son of God with power according 
to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead,' ' 
to the very end, the essential sense in which Paul uses 
the term resurrection is that of a rising, in this visible 
earthly existence, from the death of obedience to bhnd 
selfish impulse, to the life of obedience to the eternal 
moral order ; — in Christ's case first, as the pattern for us 
to follow ; in the believer's case afterwards, as following 
Christ's pattern through identifying himself with him. 

We have thus reached Paul's fundamental conception 
without even a glimpse of the fundamental conceptions 
of Puritanism, which, nevertheless, professes to have 
learnt its doctrine from St. Paul and from his Epistle 
to the Romans. Once, for a moment, the term faith 
brought us in contact with the doctrine of Puritanism, 
but only to see that the essential sense given to this 
^ Rom., i, 4. 



5/. Paul mid Protestantism. 93 

word by Paul Puritanism had missed entirely. Other 
parts, then, of the Epistle to the Romans than those by 
which we have been occupied must have chiefly fixed 
the attention of Puritanism. And so it has in truth 
been. Yet the parts of the Epistle to the Romans 
that have occupied us are undoubtedly the parts which 
not our own theories and inclinations, — for we have 
approached the matter without any, — but an impartial 
criticism of Paul's real line of thought, must elevate as 
the most important. If a somewhat pedantic form of 
expression may be forgiven for the sake of clearness, we 
may say that of the eleven first chapters of the Epistle to 
the Romans, — the chapters which convey Paul's theology, 
though not, as we have. seen, with any scholastic purpose 
or in any formal scientific mode of exposition, — of these 
eleven chapters, the first, second, and third are, in a 
scale of importance fixed by a scientific criticism of 
Paul's line of thought, sub-primary ; the fourth and fifth 
are secondary; the sixth and eighth are primary; the 
seventh chapter is sub-primary ; the ninth, tenth, and 
eleventh chapters are secondary. Furthermore, to the 
contents of the separate chapters themselves this scale 
must be carried on, so far as . to m.ark that of the two 
great primary chapters, the sixth and the eighth, the 
eighth is primary down only to the end of the twenty- 



94 ^^- Pciul mtd Protestantism. 

eighth verse ; from thence to the end it is, however 
eloquent, yet for the purpose of a scientific criticism 
of Paul's essential theology, only secondary. 

The first chapter is to the Gentiles. Its purport is : 
You have not righteousness. The second is to the Jews ; 
and its purport is : No more have you, though you think 
you have. The third chapter announces faith in Christ as 
the one source of righteousness for all men. The fourth 
chapter gives to the notion of righteousness through faith 
the sanction of the Old Testament and of the history of 
Abraham. The fifth insists on the causes for thankful- 
ness and exultation in the boon of righteousness through 
faith in Christ ; and applies illustratively, with this design, 
the history of Adam. The sixth chapter comes to the 
all-important question: *What is that faith in Christ 
which I, Paul, mean ? ' — and answers it. The seventh 
illustrates and explains the answer. But the eighth, 
down to the end of the twenty-eighth verse, develops 
and completes the answer. The rest of the eighth 
chapter expresses the sense of safety and gratitude which 
the solution is fitted to inspire. The ninth, tenth, and 
eleventh chapters uphold the second chapter's thesis, — 
so hard to a Jew, so easy to us, — that righteousness is 
not by the Jewish law ; but dwell with hope and joy on 
a final result of things which is to be favourable to Israel. 



SL Paul and Protestantism. 95 

We shall be pardoned this somewhat formal analysis 
in consideration of the clearness with which it enables us 
to survey the Puritan sclieme of original sin, predestina- 
tion, and justification. The historical transgression of 
Adam occupies, it will be observed, in Paul's ideas by 
no means the primary, fundamental, all-important place 
which it holds in the ideas of Puritanism. ' This ' (the 
transgression of Adam) ' is our original sin, the bitter root 
of all our actual transgressions in thought, word, and 
deed.' Ah, no ! Paul did not go to the Book of 
Genesis to get the real testimony about sin. He went to 
experience for it. ' / see^' he says, ' a law in my 
members fighting against the law of my mind, and 
bringing me into captivity.' ^ This is the essential 
testimony respecting the rise of sin to Paul, — this rise 
of it in his own heart and in the heart of all the men 
who hear him. At quite a later stage in his conception 
of the religious life, in quite a subordinate capacity, 
and for the mere purpose of illustration, comes in the 
allusion to Adam and to what is called original sin. 
Paul's desire for righteousness has carried him to Christ 
and to the conception of the righteousness which is of 
God by faith, and he is expressing his gratitude, delight, 
wonder, at the boon he has discovered. For the purpose 

* Rom.y vii, 23. 



96 St. Paul and Protestantism. 

of exalting it he reverts to the well-known story of 
Adam. It cannot even be said that Paul Judaises in his 
use here of this story ; so entirely does he subordinate 
it to his purpose of illustration, using it just as he might 
have used it had he believed, which undoubtedly he did 
not, that it was merely a symbolical legend, having the 
advantage of being perfectly famiHar to himself and his 
hearers. ' Think,' he says, ' how in Adam's fall one 
man's one transgression involved all men in punishment ; 
then estimate the blessedness of our boon in ^Christ, 
where one man's one righteousness involves a world of 
transgressors in blessing ! ^ This is not a scientific 
doctrine of corruption inherited through Adam's fall ; it is 
a rhetorical use of Adam's fall in a passing allusion to it. 
We come to predestination. We have seen how 
strong was Paul's consciousness of that power, not our- 
selves, in which we live and move and have our being. 
The sense of life, peace, and joy, which comes through 
identification with Christ, brings with it a deep and 
grateful consciousness that this sense is none of our own 
getting and making. No, it is grace, it is the free gift of 
God, who gives abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, 
and calls things that are not as though they were. ' It is 
not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of God 
• Rom., \, 12-21. 



St. Paid and Protestantism. 97 

that showeth mercy.' ^ As moral agents, for whom alone 
exist all the predicaments of merit and demerit, praise and 
blame, effort and failure, vice and virtue, we are impotent 
and lost ; — we are saved through that in us which is 
passive and involuntary ; we are saved through our 
affections, it is as beings acted upon and influenced that 
we are saved ! Well might Paul cry out, as this mystical 
but profound and beneficent conception filled his soul : 
^ All things work together for good to them that love 
God, to them who are the called according to his 
purpose.' 2 Well might he say, in the gratitude which 
cannot find words enough to express its sense of bound- 
less favour, that those who reached peace with God 
through identification with Christ were vessels of mercy, 
marked from endless ages ; that they had been foreknown, 
predestinated, called, justified, glorified. 

It may be regretted, for the sake of the clear under- 
standing of his essential doctrine, that Paul did not stop 
here. It might seem as if the word ' prothesis,' purpose^ 
lured hira on into speculative mazes, and involved him, 
at last, in an embarrassment, from which he impatiently 
tore himself by the harsh and unedifying image of the clay 
and the potter. But this is not so. These allurements 
of speculation, which have been fatal to so many of his 
' Rom.^ ix, 16. 2 Rom.^ viii, 28. 

H 



98 St. Paul and Protestantism. 

interpreters, never mastered Paul. He was led into 
difficulty by the tendency which we have already noticed 
as making his real imperfection both as a thinker and as 
a writer, — the tendency to Judaise. 

Already, in the fourth chapter, this tendency had led 
him to seem to rest his doctrine of justification by faith, 
upon the case of Abraham, whereas, in truth, it needs all 
the good will in the world, and some effort of ingenuity, 
even to bring the case of Abraham within the operation 
of this doctrine. That righteousness is hfe, that all men 
by themselves fail of righteousness, that only through 
identification with Jesus Christ can they reach it, — these 
propositions, for us at any rate, prove themselves much 
better than they are proved by the thesis that Abraham 
in old age beheved God's promise that his seed should 
yet be as the stars for multitude, and that this was 
counted to him for righteousness. The sanction thus 
apparently given to the idea that faith is a mere belief, 
or opinion of the mind, has put thousands of Paul's 
readers on a false track. 

But Paul's Judaising did not end here. To estab- 
lish his doctrine of righteousness by faith, he had to 
eradicate the notion that his people were specially 
privileged, and that, having the Mosaic law, they did not 
need" anything farther. For us, this one verse of the 



St. Paul and Protestantism. 99 

tenth chapter : There is no difference between Jew and 
Greek, for it is the same Lord of ail, who is rich to all that 
call upon him, — and these four words of another verse : 
For righteousness, hea^'t faith necessary I — effect far more 
for Paul's object than his three chapters bristHng with 
Old Testament quotations. By quotation, however, he 
was to proceed, in order to invest his doctrine with the 
talismanic virtues of a verbal sanction from the law and 
the prophets. He shows, therefore, that the law and 
the prophets had said that only a remnant, an elect 
remnant, of Israel should be saved, and that the rest 
should be blinded. But to say that peace with God 
through Jesus Christ inspires such an abounding sense of 
gratitude, and of its not being our work, that we can 
only speak of ourselves as called and chosen to it, is one 
thing ; in so speaking, we are on the ground of personal 
experience. To say, on the other hand, that God has 
blinded and reprobated other men, so that they shall not 
reach this blessing, is to quit the ground of .personal 
experience, and to begin employing the magnified and 
non-natural man in the next street. We then require, in 
order to account for his proceedings, such an analogy as 
that of the clay and the potter. 

This is Calvinism, and St. Paul undoubtedly falls 
into it. But the important thing to remark is, that this 

* H 2 



100 St. Paid and Protestantism. 

Calvinism, which with the Calvinist is primary, is with 
Paul secondary, or even less than secondary. What 
with Calvinists is their fundamental idea, the Centre of 
their theology, is for Paul an idea added to his central 
ideas, and extraneous to them ; brought in incidentally, 
and due to the necessities of a bad mode of recommend- 
ing and enforcing his thesis. It is as if Newton had in- 
troduced into his exposition of the law of gravitation an 
incidental remark, perhaps erroneous, about light or 
colours ; and we were then to make this remark the head 
and front of Newton's law. The theological idea of re- 
probation was an idea of Jewish theology as of ours, an 
idea famiHar to Paul and a part of his training, an idea 
which probably he never consciously abandoned. But its 
complete secondariness in him is clearly estabHshed by 
other considerations than diose which we have drawn from 
the place and manner of his introduction of it. The very 
phrase about the clay and the potter is not Paul's own ; 
he does but repeat a stock theological figure. Isaiah had 
said : ' O Lord, we are the clay, and thou our potter, and 
we are all the work of thy hand.' ^ Jeremiah had said, in 
the Lord's name, to Israel : ' Behold, as the clay in the 
potter's hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel.' ^ 
And the son of Sirach comes yet nearer to Paul's very 
' \'^.. Ixiv, 8, ^ Jei'-7 xviii, 6. 



SL Paul and Protestantism. loi 

words : 'As the clay is in the potter's hand to fashion it 
at his pleasure, so man is in the hand of him that made 
him, to render to them as liketh him best.'^ Is an 
original man's essential, characteristic idea, that which he 
adopts thus bodily from some one else ? But take Paul's 
truly essential idea. ' We are buried with Christ through 
baptism into death, that like as he was raised up from 
the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also 
shall walk in newness of life.' ^ Did Jeremiah say that? 
Is any one the author of it except Paul ? Then there 
should Calvinism have looked for Paul's secret, and not 
in the commonplace about the potter and the vessels of 
wrath. A commonplace which is so entirely a common- 
place to him, that he contradicts it even while he is 
Judaising ; for in the very batch of chapters we are 
discussing he says : ' Whosoever shall call upon the 
name of the Lord shall be saved.' ^ Still more clear is, 
on this point, his real mind, when he is not Judaising : 
' God is the saviour of all men, specially of those that 
believe.'^ And anything, finally, which might seem 
dangerous in the grateful sense of a calling, choosing, 
and leading by eternal goodness, — a notion as natural as 
the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination is monstrous, 

^ Ecclesiasticus, xxxiii, 13. - Rom., vi, 4. 

^ Rom., X, 13. * I Ti?n., iv, 10. 



102 St. Pard and Protestantism. 

— Paul abundantly supplies in more than one striking 
passage ; as, for instance, in that incomparable third 
chapter of the Philippians (from which, and from the 
sixth and eighth chapters of the Romans, Paul's whole 
theology, if all his other writings were lost, might be 
reconstructed), where he expresses his humble conscious- 
ness that the mystical resurrection which is his aim, 
glory, and salvation, he does not yet, and cannot, 
completely attain. 

The grand doctrine, then, which Calvinistic Puritan- 
ism has gathered from Paul, turns out to be a secondary 
notion of his, which he himself, too, has contradicted or 
corrected. But, at any rate, * Christ meritoriously ob- 
tained eternal redemption for us.' 'If there be any- 
thing,' the quarterly organ of Puritanism has lately told 
us in its hundredth number, ' that human experience 
has made certain, it is that man can never outgrow his 
necessity for the great truths and provisions of the In- 
carnation and the sacrificial Atonement of the Divine 
Son of God.* God, his justice being satisfied by 
Christ's bearing according to compact our guilt and 
dying in our stead, is appeased and set free to exercise 
towards us his mercy, and to justify and sanctify us in 
consideration of Christ's righteousness imputed to us, if 
we give our hearty belief and consent to the satisfaction 



St. Paid and Protestantism. 103 

thus made. This hearty belief being given, 'we rest/ 
to use the consecrated expression already quoted, ' in 
the finished work of a Saviour.' This doctrine of imputed 
righteousness is now, as predestination formerly was, the 
favourite thesis of popular Protestant theology. And, 
like the doctrine of predestination, it professes to be 
specially derived from St. Paul. 

But whoever has followed attentively the main line 
of St. Paul's theology, as we have tried to show it, will 
see at once that in St. Paul's essential ideas this popular 
notion of a substitution, and appeasement, and impu- 
tation of alien merit, has no place. Paul knows nothing 
of a sacrificial atonement; what Paul knows of is a 
reconciling sacrifice. The true substitution, for Paul, 
is not the substitution of Jesus Christ in men's stead as 
victim on the cross to God's offended justice ; it is the 
substitution by which the believer, in his own person, 
repeats Jesus Christ's dying to sin. Paul says, in real 
truth, to our Puritans with their magical and mechanical 
salvation, just what he said to the men of circumcision : 
' If I preach resting in the finished work of a Saviour, 
why am I yet persecuted! why do I die daily ? then is the 
stumbling-block of the cross annulled} That hard, that 
well-nigh impossible doctrine, that our whole course 



104 St. Paul and Protestantism. 

must be a crucifixion and a resurrection, even as Christ's 
whole course was a crucifixion and a resurrection, 
becomes superfluous. Yet this is my central doctrine.' 

The notion of God as a magnified and non -natural 
man, appeased by a sacrifice and remitting in considera- 
tion of it his wrath against those who had offended him, 
—this notion of God, which science repels, was equally 
repelled, in spite of all that his nation, time, and training 
had in them to favour it, by the profound religious sense 
of Paul. In none of his epistles is the reconciling work 
of Christ really presented under this aspect. One great 
epistle there is, however, which does apparently present 
it under this aspect, — the Epistle to the Hebrews. 

Paul's phraseology, and even the central idea which 
he conveys in that phraseology, were evidently well 
known to the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews. 
Nay, if we merely sought to prove a thesis, rather than 
to ascertain the real bearing of the documents we 
canvass, we should have no difficulty in making it 
appear, by texts taken from the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
that the doctrine of this epistle, no less than the doctrine 
of the Epistle to the Romans, differs entirely from the 
common doctrine of Puritanism. This, however, we 
shall by no means do ; because it is our honest opinion 
that the popular doctrine of ' the sacrificial Atonement 



St. Paul and Protestantism. 105 

of the Divine Son of God ' derives, if not a real, yet at 
any rate a strong apparent sanction from the Epistle to 
the Hebrews. Even supposing, what is probably true, 
that the popular doctrine is really the doctrine neither of 
the one epistle nor of the other, yet it must be con- 
fessed that while it is the reader's fault, — a fault due to 
his fixed prepossessions, and to his own want of pene- 
tration, — if he gets the popular doctrine out of the 
Epistle to the Romans, it is on the other hand the 
writer's fault and no longer the reader's, if out of the 
Epistle to the Hebrews he gets the popular doctrine. 
For the author of that epistle is, if not subjugated, yet 
at least preponderantly occupied by the idea of the 
Jewish system of sacrifices, and of the analogies to Christ's 
sacrifice which are furnished by that system. 

If other proof were wanting, this alone would make 
it impossible that the Epistle to the Hebrews should be 
Paul's ; and indeed of all the epistles which bear his name, 
it is the only one which we may not, perhaps, in spite of 
the hesitation caused by grave difficulties, be finally con- 
tent to leave in considerable part to him.^ Luther's 

^ Considerations drawn from date, place, the use of single words, 
the development of a church organisation, the development of an 
ascetic system, are not enough to make us wholly take away certain 
epistles from St. Paul. The only decisive evidence, for this purpose, 



io6 St. Paid and Protesta7itis7n. 

conjecture, which ascribes to Apollos the Epistle to the 

Hebrews, derives corroboration from the one account of 

Apollos which we have ; that ' he was an eloquent man 

and mighty in the Scriptures.' The Epistle to the 

Hebrews is just such a performance as might naturally 

have come from an eloquent man and mighty in the 

Scriptures ; in whom the intelligence, and the powers of 

combining, type-finding, and expounding, somewhat 

dominated the religious perceptions. The Epistle to the 

Hebrews is full of beauty and power ; and what may be 

called the exterior conduct of its argument is as able and 

satisfying as Paul's exterior conduct of his argument is 

generally embarrassed. Its details are full of what is 

edifying ; but its apparent central conception of Christ's 

death, as a perfect sacrifice which consummated the 

imperfect sacrifices of the Jewish law, is a mere notion of 

is that internal evidence furnished by the whole body of the thoughts 
and style of an epistle ; and this evidence that Paul was not its 
author the Epistle to the Hebrews furnishes. From the like 
evidence, the Apocalypse is clearly shown to be not by the author 
of the fourth Gospel. This clear evidence against the tradition 
which assigns them to St. Paul, the Epistles to Timothy and Titus 
do not offer. The serious ground of difficulty as to these epistles 
will to the genuine critic be, that much in them fails to produce that 
peculiarly searching effect on the reader, which it is in general 
characteristic of Paul's own real work to exercise. But they abound 
v/ith Pauline things, and are, in any case, written by an excellent 
man, and in an excellent and large spirit. 



wS"/. Paul a7id Protestantism. 107 

the understanding, and is not a religious idea. Turn it 
which way we will, the notion of appeasement of an 
offended God by vicarious sacrifice, which the Epistle to 
the Hebrews apparently sanctions, will never truly speak 
to the religious sense, or bear fruit for true religion. It 
is no blame to Apollos if he was somewhat overpowered 
by this notion, for the whole world was full of it, up to 
his time, in his time, and since his time ; and it has 
driven theologians before it like sheep. The wonder is, 
not that Apollos should have adopted it, but that Paul 
should have been enabled, through the incomparable 
power and energy of religious perception informing his 
intellectual perception, in reality to put it aside. Figures 
drawn from the dominant notion of sacrificial appease- 
ment he used, for the notion has so saturated the imagi- 
nation and language of humanity that its figures pass 
naturally and irresistibly into all our speech. Popular 
Puritanism consists of the apparent doctrine from the 
Epistle to the Hebrews, set forth with Paul's figures. 
But the doctrine itself Paul had really put aside, and had 
substituted for it a better. 

The term, sacrifice, in men's natural use of it, contains 
three notions : the notion of winning the favour or buying 
off the wrath of a powerful being by giving him something 
precious ; the notion of parting with something naturally 



io8 St. Paul and Protestantism. 

precious ; and the notion of expiation, not now in the 
sense of buying off wrath or satisfying a claim, but of 
suffering in that wherein we have sinned. The first 
notion is, at bottom, merely superstitious, and belongs to 
the ignorant and fear-ridden childhood of humanity ; it 
is the main element, however, in the Puritan conception 
of justification. The second notion explains itself; it is 
the main element in the Pauline conception of justifica- 
tion. Jesus parted with what, to men in general, is the 
most precious of things, — individual self and selfishness ; 
he pleased not himself, obeyed the spirit of God, died to 
sin and to the law in our members, consummated upon 
the cross this death ; here is Paul's essential notion of 
Christ's sacrifice. 

The third notion may easily be misdealt with, but it 
has a profound truth ; in Paul's conception of justifica- 
tion there is much of it. In some way or other, he who 
would ' cease from sin ' must nearly always ' suffer in the 
flesh.' It is found to be true, that 'without shedding of 
blood is no remission.' ' If you can be good with plea- 
sure,' says Bishop Wilson with his genius of practical reli- 
gious sense, ' God does not envy you your joy ; but such 
is our corruption, that every man cannot be so.' The 
substantial basis of the notion of expiation, so far as we 
ourselves are concerned, is the bitter experience that the 



SL Paid and Protestantism. 109 

habit of wrong, of blindly obeying selfish impulse, so 
affects our temper and powers, that to withstand selfish 
impulse, to do right, when the sense of right awakens in 
us, requires an effort out of all proportion to the actual 
present emergency. We have not only the difficulty of 
the present act in itself, we have the resistance of all our 
past ; fire and the knife, cautery and amputation, are 
often necessary in order to induce a vital action, which, 
if it were not for our corrupting past, we might have 
obtained from the natural healthful vigour of our moral 
organs. This is the real basis of our personal sense of 
the need of expiating, and thus it is that man expiates. 

Not so the just, who is man's ideal. He has no indu- 
rated habit of wrong, no perverse temper, no enfeebled 
powers, no resisting past, no spiritual organs gangrened, 
no need of the knife and fire ; smoothly and inevitably 
he follows the eternal order, and hereto belongs happi- 
ness. What sins, then, has the just to expiate ? — oiws. 
In truth, men's habitual unrighteousness, their hard and 
careless breaking of the moral law, do so tend to reduce 
and impair the standard of goodness, that, in order to 
keep this standard pure and unimpaired, the righteous 
must actually labour and suffer far more than would be 
necessary if men were better. In the first place, he has 
to undergo our hatred and persecution for his justice. 



no St. Pa2Ll and Protestantism. 

In the second place, he has to make up for the harm 
caused by our continual shortcomings, to step between 
us foolish transgressors and the destructive natural con- 
sequences of our transgression, and, by a superhuman 
example, a spending himself without stint, a more than 
mortal scale of justice and purity, to save the ideal of 
human life and conduct from the deterioration with 
which men's ordinary practice threatens it. In this way 
Jesus Christ truly ' became for our sakes poor, though he 
was rich,' he was truly ' bruised for our iniquities,' he 
' suffered in our behoof,' ' bare the sin of many,' and 
' made intercession for the transgressors.' ^ In this way, 
truly, ' he was sacrificed as a blameless lamb to redeem 
us from the vain conversation which had become our 
second nature ; ' ^ in this way, ' he was made to be sin 
for us, who knew no sin.' ^ Such, according to that true 
and profound perception of the import of Christ's suffer- 
ings, which, in all St. Paul's writings, and in the inestim- 
able First Episde of St. Peter, is presented to us, is the 
expiation of Christ. 

The notion, therefore, of satisfying and appeasing an 
angry Gods wrath, does not come into Paul's real con- 
ception of Jesus Christ's sacrifice. Paul's foremost notion 

- II Coi\, viii, 9 ; Is., lili, 5 ; I Pet., ii, 21 ; Is., liii, 12. 
2 I Pet., i, 18, 19. ^ II Cor., v, 21. 



St. Paid and Protestantism. 1 1 1 

of this sacrifice is, that by it Jesus died to the law of 
selfish impulse, parted with what to men in general is most 
precious and near. Paul's second notion is, that whereas 
Jesus suffered in doing this, his suffering was not his 
fault, but ours ; not for his good, but for ours. In the 
first aspect, Jesus is the martyrion,—\he. testimony in 
his life and in his death, to righteousness, to the power 
and goodness of God. In the second aspect he is 
the antilytron or ransom. But, in either aspect, Jesus 
Christ's solemn and dolorous condemnation of sin does 
actually loosen sin's hold and attraction upon us who 
regard it, — makes it easier for us to understand and love 
goodness, to rise above self, to die to sin. 

Christ's sacrifice, however, and the condemnation of 
sin it contained, was made for us while we were yet 
sinners ; it was made irrespectively of our power or incli- 
nation to sympathise with it and appreciate it. Yet, even 
thus, in Paul's view, the sacrifice reconciled us to God, to 
the eternal order ; for it contained the means, the only- 
possible means, of our being brought into harmony with 
this order. Jesus Christ, nevertheless, was delivered for 
our sins while we were yet sinners,^ and before we could 
yet appreciate what he did. But presently there comes a 
change. Grace, the goodness of God, the spirit^ — as Paul 
» Rom.. V, 8. 



112 5/. Paul and Protestantism. 

loved to call that awful and beneficent impulsion of 
things within us and without us, which we can concur 
with, indeed, but cannot create, — leads us to repentance 
towards God^ a change of the inner man in regard to the 
moral order, duty, righteousness.^ And now, to help our 
impulse towards righteousness, we have a power enabling 
us to turn this impulse to full account. Now the spirit 
does its greatest work in us ; now, for the first time, the in- 
fluence of Jesus Christ's pregnant act really gains us. For 
now awakens the sympathy for the act and the appreciation 
of it, which its doer dispensed with or was too benign to 
wait for ; faith working through love towards Christ ^ enters 
into us, masters us. We identify ourselves, — this is the 
line of Paul's thought, — with Christ ; we repeat, through 
the power of this identification, Christ's death to the law of 
the flesh and self-pleasing, his condemnation of sin in the 
flesh ; the death how imperfectly, the condemnation how 
remorsefully ! But we rise with him, Paul continues, to 
life, the only true life, of imitation of God, of putting on 
the new man which after God is created in righteousness 
and true holiness,^ of following the eternal law of the 
moral order which by ourselves we could not follow. 
Then God justifies us. We have the righteousness of God 
and the sense of having it ; we are freed from the oppress - 
' Acts, XX, 21. - Gal., V, 6. ' E_ph., iv, 24. 



St Paid and Protestantism. 113 

ing sense of eternal order guiltily outraged and sternly 
retributive ; we act in joyful conformity with God's will, 
instead of in miserable rebellion to it ; we are in harmony 
with the universal order, and feel that we are in harmony 
with it. If, then, Christ was delivered for our sins, he 
was raised for our justification. If by Christ's death, 
says Paul, we were reconciled to God, by the means 
being thus provided for our else impossible access to 
God, much more, when we have availed ourselves of 
these means and died with him, are we saved by his life 
which we partake. ^ Henceforward we are not only 
justified but sanctified; not only in harmony with the 
eternal order and at peace with God, but consecrated^ 
and unalterably devoted to them ; and from this devotion 
comes an ever-growing union with God in Christ, an 
advance, as St. Paul says, from glory to glory. ^ 

This is Paul's conception of Christ's sacrifice. His 
figures of ransom, redemption, propitiation, blood, offer- 
ing, all subordinate themselves to his central idea of 
identification with Christ through dying with him, and 

^ Rom., V, 10. 

^ The endless words whicli Puritanism has wasted upon sancti- 
Jicatioji, a magical filling with goodness and holiness, flow from a 
meie mistake in translating ; a'yia.(Tix6s means consecration, a setting 
apart to holy service. 

3 II Cor., iii, 18. 



1 14 St. Paul and Protestantism. 

are strictly subservient to it. The figured speech of 
Paul has its own beauty and propriety. His language is, 
much of it, eastern language, imaginative language ; there 
is no need for turning it, as Puritanism has done, into 
the methodical language of the schools. But if it is to be 
turned into methodical language, then it is the language 
into which we have translated it that translates it truly. 

We have before seen how it fares with one of the two 
great tenets which Puritanism has extracted from St. Paul, 
the tenet of predestination. We now see how it fares with 
the other, the tenet of justification. Paul's figures our 
Puritans have taken literally, while for his central idea 
they have substituted another which is not his. And 
his central idea they have turned into a figure, and have 
let it almost disappear out of their mind. His essential 
idea lost, his figures misused, an idea essentially not his 
substituted for his, — the unedifying patchwork thus made, 
Puritanism has stamped with Paul's name, and called 
the gospel. It thunders at Romanism for not preaching 
it, it casts off Anglicanism for not setting it forth alone 
and unreservedly, it founds organisations of its own to 
give full effect to it ; these organisations guide politics, 
govern statesmen, destroy institutions ; — and they are 
based upon a blunder ! 

It is to Protestantism, and this its Puritan gospel, 



vSV. Paid and Protestantism. 115 

that the reproaches thrown on St. Paul, for sophisticating 
religion of the heart into theories of the head about 
election and justification, rightly attach. St. Paul him- 
self, as we have seen, begins with seeking righteousness 
and ends with finding it ; from first to last, the practical 
religious sense never deserts him. If he could have 
seen and heard our preachers of predestination and 
justification, they are just the people he would have 
called '■ diseased about questions and word-battlings.' ^ 
He would have told Puritanism that every Sunday, when 
in all its countless chapels it reads him and preaches 
from him, the veil is upon its heart. The moment it 
reads him right, a veil will seem to be taken away from 
its heart ; ^ it will feel as though scales were fallen from 
its eyes. 

And now, leaving Puritanism and its errors, let us turn 
again for a moment, before we end, to the glorious 
apostle who has occupied us so long. He died, and men's 
familiar fancies of bargain and appeasement, from which, 
by a prodigy of religious insight, Paul had been able to 
disengage the death of Jesus, fastened on it and made 
it their own. Back rolled over the human soul the mist 
which the fires of Paul's spiritual genius had dispersed 
» I 7V;;z., vi, 4. ^ jj q^^^^ jij^ j^^ jg^ 

I 2 



1 16 St. Paul and Protestantism, 

for a few short years. The mind of the whole world 
was imbrued in the idea of blood, and only through the 
false idea of sacrifice did men reach Paul's true one. 
Paul's idea of dying with Christ the Imitation elevates 
more conspicuously than any Protestant treatise elevates 
it; but it elevates it environed and dominated by the 
idea of appeasement j — of the magnified and non-natural 
man in Heaven, wrath-filled and blood-exacting; of the 
human victim adding his piacular sufferings to those of 
the divine. Meanwhile another danger was preparing. 
Gifted men had brought to the study of St. Paul the 
habits of the Greek and Roman schools, and philo- 
sophised where Paul Orientalised. Augustine, a great 
genius, who can doubt it? — nay, a great religious 
genius, but unlike Paul in this, and inferior to him, 
that he confused the boundaries of metaphysics and 
religion, which Paul never did, — Augustine set the 
example of finding in Paul's eastern speech, just as it 
stood, the formal propositions of western dialectics. 
Last came the interpreter in whose slowly relaxing grasp 
we still lie, — the heavy-handed Protestant Philistine. 
Sincere, gross of perception, prosaic, he saw in Paul's 
mystical idea of man's investiture with the righteousness 
of God nothing but a strict legal transaction, and re- 
served all his imagination for Hell and the New Jeru- 



St. Paid and Protestantism. 117 

salem and his foretaste of them. A so-called Pauline 
doctrine was in all men's mouths, but the ideas of the true 
Paul lay lost and buried. 

Every one who has been at Rome has been taken to 
see the Church of St. Paul, rebuilt after a destruction by 
fire forty years ago. The church stands a mile or two 
out of the city, on the way to Ostia and the desert. 
The interior has all the costly magnificence of Italian 
churches; on the ceiling is written in gilded letters : 
' Dodor Gentium.' Gold glitters and marbles gleam, 
but man and his movement are not there. The traveller 
has left at a distance the fumum et opes strepitumque 
Romce \ around him reigns solitude. There is Paul, 
with the mystery which was hidden from ages and from 
generations, which was uncovered by him for some half 
score years, and which then was buried with him in his 
grave ! Not in our day will he relive, with his incessant 
effort to find a moral side for miracle, with his incessant 
effort to make the intellect follow and secure all the 
workings of the religious perception. Of those who care 
for religion, the multitude of us want the materialism of 
the Apocalypse ; the few want a vague religiosity. Science, 
which more and more teaches us to find in the unapparent 
the real, will gradually serve to conquer the materialism 
of popular religion. The friends of vague religiosity, on 



1 1 8 SL Paul and P^'otestantism, 

the other hand, will be more and more taught by expe- 
rience that a theology, a scientific appreciation of the 
facts of religion, is wanted for religion \ but a theology 
which is a true theology, not a false. Both these in- 
fluences will work for Paul's re-emergence. The doctrine 
of Paul will arise out of the tomb where for centuries it 
has lain buried. It will edify the church of the future ; 
it will have the consent of happier generations, the 
applause of less superstitious ages. All will be too little 
to pay half the debt which the church of God owes to 
this ' least of the apostles, who was not fit to be called an 
apostle, because he persecuted the church of God.' ^ 

' I Cor., XV, 9. 



PURITANISM 



AND THE 



CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 



PURITANISM 



AND THE 



CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 



In the foregoing treatise we have spoken of Protestantism, 
and have tried to show, how, with its three notable tenets 
of predestination, original sin, and justification, it has been 
pounding away for three centuries at St. Paul's wrong 
words, and missing his essential doctrine. And we took 
Puritanism to stand for Protestantism, and addressed our- 
selves directly to the Puritans ; for the Puritan Churches, 
we said, seem to exist specially for the sake of these doc- 
trines, one or more of them. It is true, many Puritans now 
profess also the doctrine that it is wicked to have a church 
connected with the State; but this is a later invention,^ 

^ In his very interesting history, The Church of the Restoration, 
Dr. Stoughton says most truly of both Anglicans and Puritans in 



122 Pttritanism and the Chitrch of England. 

designed to strengthen a separation previously made. 
It requires to be noticed in due course ; but meanwhile, 
we say that the aim of setting forth certain Protestant 
doctrines purely and integrally is the main title on 
which Puritan Churches rest their right of existing. 
With historic Churches, like those of England or Rome, 
it is otherwise; these doctrines may be in them, may 
be a part of their traditions, their theological stock ; 
but certainly no one will say that either of these 
Churches was made for the express purpose of uphold- 
ing these three theological doctrines, jointly or severally. 
A little consideration will show quite clearly the differ- 
ence in this respect between the historic Churches and 
the churches of separatists. 

People are not necessarily monarchists or republicans 
because they are born and live under a monarchy or 
republic. They avail themselves of the established 
government for those general purposes for which govern- 
ments and politics exist, but they do not, for the most 
part, trouble their heads much about particular theoretical 
principles of government. Nay, it may well happen that 
a man who lives and thrives under a monarchy shall yet 

1660: ' It is necessaiy to bear in mind this circumstance, that ^^//^ 
parties were advocates for a national cstablisluneiit of religion.'' Vol. 
i, p. 113. 



PtLvitanisin and the Church of England. 123 

theoretically disapprove the principle of monarchy, or 
a man who lives and thrives under a republic, the 
principle of republicanism. But a man, or body of men, 
who have gone out of an established polity from zeal for 
the principle of monarchy or republicanism, and have 
set up a polity of their own for the very purpose of 
giving satisfaction to this zeal, are in a false position 
whenever it shall appear that the principle, from zeal 
for which they have constituted their separate existence, 
is unsound. So predestinarianism and solifidianism, 
Calvinism and Lutherism, may appear in the theology 
of a national or historic Church, charged ever since the 
rise of Christianity with the task of developing the 
immense and complex store of ideas contained in 
Christianity; and when the stage of development has 
been reached at which the unsoundness of predestinarian 
and solifidian dogmas becomes manifest, they will be 
dropped out of the Church's theology, and she and her 
task will remain what they were before. But when 
people from zeal for these dogmas lind their historic 
Church not predestinarian or solifidian enough for them, 
and make new associations of their own, which shall be 
predestinarian or solifidian absolutely, then, when the 
dogmas are undermined, the associations are under- 
mined too, and have either to own themselves without 



1 24 PiLvitanism and the Church of England. 

a reason for existing, or to discover some new reason 
in place of the old. Now, nothing which exists likes to 
be driven to a strait of this kind ; so every association 
which exists because of zeal for the dogmas of election 
or justification, will naturally cling to these dogmas 
longer and harder than other people. Therefore we 
have treated the Puritan bodies in this country as the 
great stronghold here of these doctrines ; and in showing 
what a perversion of Paul's real ideas these doctrines 
commonly called Pauline are, we have addressed our- 
selves to the Puritans. 

But those who speak in the Puritans' name say that 
we charge upon Puritanism, as a sectarian peculiarity, 
doctrine which is not only the inevitable result of an 
honest interpretation of the writings of St. Paul, but 
which is, besides, the creed held in common by Puritans 
and by all the churches in Christendom, with one 
insignificant exception. Nay, they even declare that 
*no man in his senses can deny that the Church of 
England was meant to be a thoroughly Protestant and 
Evangelical, and it may be said Calvinistic Church.' 
To saddle Puritanism in special with the doctrines we 
have called Puritan is, they say, a piece of unfairness 
which has its motive in mere ill-will to Puritanism, a 
device which can injure nobody but its author. 



Puritanism and the Chitrch of England. 125 

Now, we have tried to show that the Puritans are 
quite wrong in imagining their doctrine to be the inevit- 
able resuh of an honest interpretation of St. Paul's 
writings. That they are wrong we. think is certain ; but 
so far are we from being moved, in anything that we do 
or say in this matter, by ill-will to Puritanism and the 
Puritans, that it is, on the contrary, just because of our 
hearty respect for them, and from our strong sense of 
their value, that we speak as we do. Certainly we con- 
sider them to be in the main, at present, an obstacle to 
progress and to true civilisation. But this is because 
their worth is, in our opinion, such that not only must 
one for their own sakes wish to see it turned to more 
advantage, but others, from whom they are now separated, 
would greatly gain by conjunction with them, and our 
whole collective force of growth and progress be thereby 
immeasurably increased. In short, our one feeling when 
we regard them, is a feeling, not of ill-will, but of regret 
at waste of power ; our one desire is a desire of compre- 
hension. 

But the waste of power must continue, and the com- 
prehension is impossible, so long as Puritanism iinagines 
itself to possess, in its two or three signal doctrines, what 
it calls the gospel) so long as it constitutes itself separately 
on the plea of setting forth purely the gospel^ which it thus 



126 PiLritanism and the CJmrch of England. 

imagines itself to have seized ; so long as it judges others 
as not holding the gospel^ or as holding additions to it and 
variations from it. This fatal self- righteousness, grounded 
on a false conceit of knowledge, makes comprehension 
impossible ; because it takes for granted the possession 
of the truth, and the power of deciding how others violate 
it ; and this is a position of superiority, and suits con- 
quest rather than comprehension. ^ 

The good of comprehension in a national Church 
is, that the larger and more various the body of 
members, the more elements of power and life the 
Church will contain, the more points will there be of 
contact, the more mutual support and stimulus, the more 
growth in perfection both of thought and practice. 
The waste of power from not comprehending the 
Puritans in the national Church is measured by the 
number and value of elements which Puritanism could 
supply towards the collective growth of the whole body. 
The national Church would grow more vigorously 
towards a higher stage of insight into religious truth, 
and consequently towards a greater perfection of practice, 
if it had these elements \ and this is why we wish for the 
Puritans in the Church. But, meanwhile, Puritanism 
will not contribute to the common growth, mainly 
because it believes that a certain set of opinions or 



Pjiritanisin and the ChitrcJi of England. 12/ 

scheme of theological doctrine is the gospel ; that it is 
possible and profitable to extract this, and that Puritans 
have done so ; and that it is the duty of men, who like 
themselves have extracted it, to separate themselves from 
those who have not, and to set themselves apart that 
they may profess it purely. 

To disabuse them of this error, which, by preventing 
collective life, prevents also collective growth, it is 
necessary to show them that their extracted scheme 
of theological doctrine is not really the gospel ; and that 
at any rate, therefore, it is not worth their while to 
separate themselves, and to frustrate the hope of growth 
in common, merely for this scheme's sake. And even if 
it were true, as they allege, that the national and historic 
Churches of Christendom do equally with Puritanism 
hold this scheme, or main parts of it, still it would be to 
Puritanism, and not to the historic Churches, that in 
showing the invalidity and unscripturalness of this 
scheme we should address ourselves, because the Puritan 
Churches found their very existence on it, and the 
historic Churches do not. And not founding their exist- 
ence on it, nor falling into separatism for it, the historic 
Churches have a collective life which is very consider- 
able, and a power of growth, even in respect of the very 
scheme of doctrine in question, supposing them to hold 



128 PiLritanisrn and tJie CJiiirch of England. 

it, far greater than any which the Puritan Churches 
show, but which would be yet greater and more fruitful 
still, if the historic Churches combined the large and 
admirable contingent of Puritanism with their own forces. 
Therefore, as we have said, it is out of no sort of malice 
or ill-will, but from esteem for their fine qualities and from 
desire for their help, that we have addressed ourselves to 
the Puritans. We propose to complete now our dealings 
with this subject by showing how, as a matter of fact, the 
Church of England (which is the historic Church practi- 
cally in question so far as Puritanism is concerned) seems 
to us to have displayed with respect to those very tenets 
which we have criticised, and for which we are said to 
have unfairly made Puritanism alone responsible, a 
continual power of growth which has been wanting to the 
Puritan congregations. This we propose to show first ; 
and we will show secondly, how, from the very theory of 
a historic or national Church, the probability of this 
greater power of growth seems to follow, that we may try 
and commend that theory a little more to the thoughts 
and favour of our Puritan friends. 

The two great Puritan doctrines which we have 
criticised at such length are the doctrines of predestination 
and justification. Of the aggressive and militant Puritan- 
ism of our people, predestination has, almost up to the 



Picritanism and the CJiitrch of England. 129 

present day, been the favourite and distinguishing doctrine; 
it was the doctrine which Puritan flocks greedily sought, 
which Puritan ministers powerfully preached, and called 
others carnal gospellers for not preaching. This Geneva 
doctrine accompanied the Geneva discipline. Puritanism's 
first great wish and endeavour was to establish both the 
one and the other absolutely^ in the Church of England, 
and it became nonconforming because it failed. Now, 
it is well known that the High Church divines of the 
seventeenth century were Arminian, that the Church of 
England was the stronghold of Arminianism, and that 
Arminianism is, as we have said, an effort of man's 
practical good sense to get rid of what is shocking 
to it in Calvinism. But what is not so well known, 
and what is eminently worthy of remark, is the con- 
stant pressure applied by Puritanism upon the Church 
of England, to put the Calvinistic doctrine more distinctly 
into her formularies, and to tie her up more strictly to 
this doctrine ; the constant resistance offered by the 
Church of England, and the large degree in which 
Nonconformity is really due to this cause. 

Everybody knows how far Nonconformity is due to 
the Church of England's rigour in imposing an explicit 
declaration of adherence to her formularies. But only a 
few, who have searched out the matter, know how far 

K 



130 Piiritanism and the Chtirch of England. 

Nonconformity is due, also, to the Church of England's 
invincible reluctance to narrow her large and loose for- 
mularies to the strict Calvinistic sense dear to Puritan- 
ism. Yet this is what the record of conferences shows 
at least as signally as it shows the domineering spirit 
of the High Church clergy ; but our current political 
histories, written always with an anti-ecclesiastical bias, 
which is natural enough, inasm.uch as the Church party 
was not the party of civil liberty, leaves this singularly 
out of sight. Yet there is a very catena of testimonies 
to prove it ; to show us, from Elizabeth's reign to Charles 
the Second's, Calvinism, as a power both within and 
without the Church of England, trying to get decisive 
command of her formularies ; and the Church of England, 
with the instinct of a body meant to live and grow, and 
averse to fetter and engage its future, steadily resisting. 

The Lambeth Articles of 1595 exhibit Calvinism 
potent in the Church of England herself, and among 
the bishops of the Church. True ; but could it establish 
itself there ? No ; the Lambeth Articles were recalled 
and suppressed, and Archbishop Whitgift was threatened 
with the penalties of a pi^ceinwiire for having published 
them. Again, it was usual from 1552 onwards to print 
in the Enghsh Bibles a catechism asserting the Cal- 
vinistic doctrine of absolute election and reprobation. 



Pitritanism and the ChitrcJi of England. 131 

In the first Bibles of the authorised version this cate- 
chism appeared j but it was removed in 1615. Yet the 
Puritans had met James the First, at his accession in 
1603, with the petition that there may lie an U7iifor77iity of 
doctrine p7'escril)ed ; meaning an uniformity in this sense 
of strict Calvinism. Thus from the very commencement 
the Church, as regards doctrine, was for opening ; Puri- 
tanism was for narrowing. 

Then came, in 1604, the Hampton Court Conference. 
Here, as usual, political historians reproach the Church 
with having conceded so little. These historians, as we 
have said, think solely of the Puritans as the religious 
party favourable to civil liberty, and on that account 
desire the preponderance of Puritanism in its disputes 
with the Church. But, as regards freedom of thought 
and truth of ideas, what was it that the Church was 
pressed by Puritanism to concede, and what was the 
character and tendency of the Church's refusal? The 
first Puritan petition at this Conference was 'that the 
doctrine of the Church might be preserved in purity ac- 
cording to God's Word.' That is, according to the 
Calvinistic interpretation put upon God's Word by Calvin 
and the Puritans after him j an interpretation which we 
have shown to be erroneous and unscriptural. This Cal- 
vinistic doctrine of predestination the Puritans wanted to 

K2 



132 PiLritanism and the Church of England. 

plant hard and fast in the Church's formularies, and the 
Church resisted. The Puritan foreman complained of the 
loose wording of the Thirty-nine Articles because it 
allowed an escape from the strict doctrine of Calvinism, 
and moved that the Lambeth Articles, strictly Calvinistic, 
might be inserted into the Book of Articles. The 
Bishops resisted, and here are the words of their spokes- 
man, the Bishop of London. ' The Bishop of London 
answered, that too many in those days, neglecting holi- 
ness of life, laid all their religion npon predestination, — " If 
I shall be saved, I shall be saved," which he termed a 
desperate doctrine, showing it to be contrary to good 
divinity, which teaches us to reason rather ascendendo 
than descendendo, thus : " I live in obedience to God, in 
love with F my neighbour, I follow my vocation, &c., 
therefore I trust that God hath elected me and predesti- 
nated me to salvation ; " not thus, which is the usual 
course of argument : " God hath predestinated and 
chosen me to life, therefore, though I sin never so grie- 
vously, I shall not be damned, for whom he once loveth 
he loveth to the end." ' Who will deny that this resist- 
ance of the Church to the Puritans, who, laying all their 
religion upon predestination, wanted to make the Church 
do the same, was as favourable to growth of thought and 
to sound philosophy, as it was consonant to good sense ? 



Purita7iism and the Church of England. 133 

We have already, in the foregoing treatise, quoted 
from the complaints against the Church by the Committee 
of Divines appointed by the House of Lords in 1641, 
when Puritanism was strongly in the ascendent. Some 
in the Church teach, say the Puritan complainers, ' that 
good works are concauses with faith in the act of justifi- 
cation ; some have oppugned the certitude of salvation ; 
some have maintained that the Lord's day is kept merely 
by ecclesiastical constitution ; some have defended the 
whole gross substance of Arminianism, that the act of 
conversion depends upon the concurrence of men's free 
will ; some have denied original sin ; some have broached 
out of Socinus a most uncomfortable and desperate 
doctrine, that late repentance, — that is, upon the last bed 
of sickness, — is unfruitful, at least, to reconcile the peni- 
tent to God.' What we insist upon is, that the growth 
and movement of thought, on religious matters, are 
here shown to be in the Church ; and that on these two 
cardinal doctrines of predestination and justification, 
with which we are accused of unfairly saddling Puri- 
tanism alone, Puritanism did really want to make the 
national religion hinge, while the Church did not, but 
resisted. 

The resistance of the Church was at that time van- 
quished, not by importing strict Calvinism into the 



134 Pitritanism and the Chicrch of England. 

Prayer Book, but by casting out the Prayer Book alto- 
gether. By ordinance in 1645, the use of the Prayer 
Book, which for churches had aheady been forbidden, 
was forbidden also for all private places and families ; all 
copies to be found in churches were to be delivered up, 
and heavy penalties were imposed on persons retaining 
them. 

We come to the occasion where the Church is 
thought to have most decisively shown her unyielding- 
ness, — the Savoy Conference in 1661, after King Charles 
the Second's restoration. The question was, what altera- 
tions were to be made in the Prayer Book, so as to 
enable the Puritans to use it as well as the Church party. 
Having in view doctrine and free development of thought, 
we say again it was the Puritans who were for narrowing, 
it was the Churchmen who were for keeping open. Their 
heads full of these tenets of predestination, original sin, 
and justification, which we are accused of charging upon 
them exclusively and unfairly, the Puritans complain 
that the Church Liturgy seems very defective, — why? 
Because ' the systems of doctrine of a church should 
summarily comprehend all such doctrines as are neces- 
sary to be believed,' and the liturgy does not set down 
these explicitly enough. For instance, ' the Confession,' 
they say, ' is very defective, not clearly expressing original 



Puritanism and the CJitLvch of England. 135 

sin. The Catechism is defective as to many necessary 
doctrines of our religion, some even of the essentials of 
Christianity not being mentioned except in the Creed, 
and there not so explicit as ought to be in a catechism/ 
And what is the answer of the bishops? It is the 
answer of people with an instinct that this definition and 
explicitness demanded by the Puritans are incompatible 
with the conditions of life of a historic church. ' The 
Church,' they say, ' hath been careful to put nothing into 
the Liturgy but that which is either evidently the Word 
of God, or what hath been generally received in the 
Catholic Church.' The Catechism is not intended as a 
whole body of divinity/ The Puritans had requested 
that ' the Church prayers might contain nothing qtiestioned 
by piotis, learned, and orthodox persons.^ Seizing on this 
expression, wherein is contained the ground of that 
separatism for opinions which we hold to be so fatal not 
only to Church life but also to the natural growth of 
religious thought, the bishops ask, and in the very 
language of good sense : ' Who are pious^ lea7'ned, and 
orthodox persons 2 Are we to take for such all who shall 
confidently affirm themselves to be such ? If by ortho- 
dox be meant those who adhere to Scripture and the 
Catholic consent of antiquity, we do not yet know that 
any part of our Liturgy- has been questioned by such. 



I ^6 PiLritanism and the Church of England. 

It was the wisdom of our reformers to draw up such a 
liturgy as neither Romajiist nor Protestant coidd justly 
except against. Persons want the book to be altered for 
their own satisfaction.' 

This allegation respecting the character of the Liturgy- 
is undoubtedly true, for the Puritans themselves expressly 
admitted its truth, and urged this as a reason for altering 
the Liturgy. It is in consonance with what is so often 
said, and truly said, of the Thirty-nine Articles, that they 
are articles of peace. This, indeed, makes the Articles 
scientifically worthless. Metaphysical propositions, such 
as they in the main are, drawn up with a studied 
design for their being vague and loose, can have no 
metaphysical value. But no one then thought of doing 
without metaphysical articles ; so to make them articles 
of peace showed a true conception of the conditions of 
life and growth in a church. The readiness to put a lax 
sense on subscription is a proof of the same disposition of 
mind. Chillingworth's judgment about the meaning of 
subscription is well known. ' For the Church of England, 
I am persuaded that the constant doctrine of it is so pure 
and orthodox, that whosoever believes it and lives ac- 
cording to it, undoubtedly he shall be saved ; and that 
there is no error in it which may necessitate or warrant 
any man to disturb the peace or renounce the communion 



PtLvitanism and the CJmrch of England. I'^'j 

of it. This, in my opinion, is all that is intended by 
subscription' And Laud, a very different man from 
Chillingworth, held on this point a like opinion with him. 
Certainly the Church of England was in no humour, 
at the time of the Savoy Conference, to deal tenderly 
with the Puritans. It was too much disposed to show 
to the Puritans the same sort of tenderness which the 
Puritans had shown to the Church. The nation, more- 
over, was nearly as ill-disposed as the Church to the 
Puritans j and this proves well what the narrowness and 
tyrannousness of Puritanism dominant had really been. 
But the Church undoubtedly said and did to Puritanism 
after the Restoration much that was harsh and bitter, and 
therefore inexcusable in a Christian church. Examples 
of Churchmen so speaking and dealing may be found in 
the transactions of 1661 j but perhaps the most offensive 
example of a Churchman of this kind, and who deserves 
therefore to be studied, is a certain Dr. Jane, Regius 
Professor of Divinity at Oxford and Dean of Gloucester, 
who was put forward to thwart Tillotson's projects of 
comprehension in 1689. A certain number of Dr. Janes 
there have always been in the Church. There are a 
certain number of them in the Church now, and there 
always will be a certain number of them. No Church 
could exist with many of them ; but one should have a 



13S PiLvitanism and the Church of England. 

sample or two of them always before one's mind, and 
remember how to the excluded party a few, and those 
the worst, of their excluders, are always apt to stand for 
the whole, in order to comprehend the full bitterness and 
resentment of Puritanism against the Church of England. 
Else one would be inclined to say, after attentively and 
impartially observing the two parties, that the persistence 
of the Church in pressing for conformity arose, not as the 
political historians would have it, from the lust of haughty 
ecclesiastics for dominion and for imposing their law on 
the vanquished, but from a real sense that their formu- 
laries were made so large and open, and the sense put upon 
subscription to them was so indulgent, that any reason- 
able man could honestly conform ; and that it was per- 
verseness and determination to impose their special ideas 
on the Church, and to narrow the Church's latitude, which 
made the Puritans stand out. 

Nay, and it was with the diction of the Prayer 
Book, as it was with its doctrine ; the Church took the 
side which most commands the sympathy of liberal- 
minded men. Baxter had his rival Prayer Book which 
he proposed to substitute for the old one. And 
this is how the ' Reformed Liturgy ' was to begin : 
' Eternal, incomprehensible and invisible God, infinite 
in power, wisdom and goodness, dwelling in the light 



Puritanism and the Church of England. 139 

which no man can approach, where thousand thou- 
sands minister unto thee, and ten thousand times ten 
thousand stand before thee,' &c. This, I say, was to 
have taken the place of our old friend, Dearly beloved 
brethren ; and here, again, we can hardly refuse approval 
to the Church's resistance to Puritan innovations. We 
could wish, indeed, the Church had shown the same 
largeness in consenting to relax ceremonies, which she 
showed in refusing to tighten dogma, or to spoil diction. 
Worse still, the angry wish to drive by violence, when the 
other party will not move by reason, finally no doubt 
appears ; and the Church has much to blame herself for 
in the Act of Uniformity. Blame she deserves, and she 
has had it plentifully ; but what has not been enough 
perceived is, that really the conviction of her own mode- 
ration, openness, and latitude, as far as regards doctrine, 
seems to have filled her mind during her dealings with 
the Puritans ; and that her impatience with them was in 
great measure impatience at seeing these so ill-appreciated 
by them. Very ill-appreciated by them they certainly 
were ; and, as far as doctrine is concerned, the quarrel 
between the Church and Puritanism undoubtedly was, 
that for the doctrines of predestination, original sin, and 
justification, Puritanism wanted more exclusive promi- 



140 Puritanism and the CJinrch of England. 

nence, more dogmatic definition, more bar to future 
escape and development ; while the Church resisted. 

And as the instinct of the Church always made her 
avoid, on these three favourite tenets of Puritanism, the 
stringency of definition which Puritanism tried to force 
upon her, always made her leave herself room for growth 
in regard to them, — so, if we look for the positive begin- 
nings and first signs of growth, of disengagement from 
the stock notions of popular theology about predestina- 
tion, original sin, and justification, it is among Church- 
men, and not among Puritans, that we shall find them. 
Few will deny that as to the doctrines of predestination 
and original sin, at any rate, the mind of religious men 
is no longer what it was in the seventeenth century or 
in the eighteenth. There has been evident growth and 
emancipation ; Puritanism itself no longer holds these 
doctrines in the rigid way it once did. To whom is this 
change owing ? who were the beginners of it ? They 
were men using that comparative openness of mind and 
accessibility to ideas which was fostered by the Church. 
The very complaints which we have quoted from the 
Puritan divines prove that this was so. Henry More, 
saying in the heat of the Calvinistic controversy, what it 
needed insight to say then, but what almost every one's 
common sense says now, that ' it were to be wished the 



Puritanism and tJie CJmrcJi of England. 141 

Quinquarticular points were all reduced to this one, 
namely, That none shall be saved without sincere obedi- 
ence ; ' Jeremy Taylor saying in the teeth of the super- 
stitious popular doctrine of original sin : ' Original sin, 
as it is at this day commonly explicated, was not the 
■doctrine of the primitive church ; but when Pelagius had 
puddled the stream, St. Austin was so angry that he 
stamped and puddled it more,' — this sort of utterance 
from Churchmen it was, that first introduced into our 
religious world the current of more independent thought 
-concerning the doctrines of predestination and original 
sin, which has now made its way even amidst Puritans 
themselves. 

Here the emancipation has reached the Puritans ; 
but it proceeded from the Church. That Puritanism is 
yet emancipated from the popular doctrine of justification 
cannot be asserted. On the contrary, the more it loosens 
its hold on the doctrine of predestination the more it 
tightens it on that of justification. We shall have occa- 
sion by and by to discuss Wesley's words : ' Plead thoic 
solely the blood of the' Covenant, the ransom paid for 
thy proiLd stubborn sold I ' and to show how modern 
Methodism glories in holding aloft as its standard 
this teaching of Wesley's, and this teaching above all. 
The many tracts which have lately been sent me in refer- 



142 Puritanism and the Chttrch of England. 

ence to this subject go all the same way. Like Luther, 
they hold that ' all heretics have continually failed in this 
one point, that they do not rightly understand or know 
the article of justification : ' ' do not see ' (to continue to 
use Luther's words,) ' that by none other sacrifice or offer- 
ing could God's fierce anger be appeased, but by the 
precious blood of the Son of God.' That this doctrine is 
founded upon an entire misunderstanding of St. Paul's 
writings we have shown ; that there is very visible a ten- 
dency in the minds of religious people to outgrow it, is 
true, but where alone does this tendency manifest itself 
with any steadiness or power? In the Church. The 
inevitable movement of growth will in time extend 
itself to Puritanism also. Let it be remembered in 
that day that not only does the movement come to 
Puritanism from the Church, but it comes to Churchmen 
of our century from a seed of growth and development 
inherent in the Church, and which was manifest in the 
Church long ago ! 

That the accompaniments of the doctrine of justifi- 
cation, the tenets of conversion, instantaneous sancti- 
fication, assurance, and sinless perfection, — tenets which 
are not the essence of Wesley, but which are the essence 
of Wesleyan Methodism, and which have in them so 
much that is delusive and dangerous, — that these should 



PiLritanisin and the Church of England. 143 

have been discerningly judged by that mixture of piety 
and sobriety which marks Anglicans of the best type, 
such as Bishop Wilson, ^ will surprise no one. But years 
before Wesley was born, the fontal doctrine itself, — ■ 
Wesley's ' Plead thou solely the blood of the Covenant I' — 
had been criticised by Hammond thus, and the signal of 
deliverance from the Lutheran doctrine of justification 
given : ' The solifidian looks upon his faith as the utmost 
accomplishment and end, and not only as the first elements 
of his task, which is, — the siiperst7'ucting of good life. The 
solifidian believes himself to have the only sanctified 
necessary doctrines, that having them renders his condition 
safe, and every man who believes them a pure Christian 
professor. In respect of solifidianism it is worth re- 
membering what Epiphanius observes of the primitive 
times, that wickedness was the only heresy^ that impious 
and pious living divided the whole Christian world into 
erroneous and orthodox.' 

In point of fact, therefore, the historic Church in 
England, not existing for special opinions, but proceeding 
by development, has shown much greater freedom of 

^ For example, what an antidote to the perilous Methodist 
doctrine of instantaneous sanctification is this saying of Bishop 
Wilson : * He who fancies that his mind may effectually be changed 
' in a short time, deceives himself 



144 Puritanism and the CImrch of England. 

mind as regards the doctrines of election, original sin, 
and justification, than the Nonconformists have ; and 
has refused, in spite of Puritan pressure, to tie herself too 
strictly to these doctrines, to make them all in all. She 
thus both has been and is more serviceable than Puritan- 
ism to religious progress; because the separating for 
opinions, which is proper to Puritanism, rivets the sepa- 
ratist to those opinions, and is thus opposed to that 
development and gradual exhibiting of the full sense of 
the Bible and Christianity, which is essential to religious 
progress. To separate for the doctrine of predestination, 
of justification, of scriptural church-discipline, is to be 
false to the idea of development, to imagine that you can 
seize the absolute sense of Scripture from your own 
present point of view, and to cut yourself off from growth 
and gradual illumination. That a comparison between 
the course things have taken in Puritanism and in the 
Church goes to prove the truth of this as a matter of fact, 
is what I have been trying to show hitherto ; in what re- 
mains I purpose to show how, as a matter of theory and 
antecedent likelihood, it seems probable and natural that 
so this should be. 

A historic Church cannot choose but allow the 
principle of development, for it is written in its institu- 
tions and history. An admirable writer, in a book which 



Picritanisin and the CJmrch of England. 145 

is one of his least known works, but which contains, 
perhaps, even a greater number of profound and valuable 
ideas than any other one of them, has set forth, both 
persuasively and truly, the impression of this sort which 
Church-history cannot but convey. ' We have to account,' 
says Dr. Newman, in his Essay on Development^ 'for that 
apparent variation and growth of doctrine which 
embarrasses us w^hen we would consult history for the 
true idea of Christianity. The increase and expansion of 
the Christian creed and ritual, and the variations which 
have attended the process in the case of individual writers 
•and churches, are the necessary attendants on any 
philosophy or polity which takes possession of the 
intellect and heart, and has had any wide or extended 
dominion. From the nature of the human mind, time is 
necessary for the full comprehension and perfection of 
great ideas. The highest and most wonderful truths, 
though communicated to the world once for all by inspired 
teachers, could not be comprehended all at once by the 
recipients ; but, as admitted and transmitted by minds 
not inspired, and through media which were human, have 
required only the longer time and deeper thought for their 
full elucidation.' And again : ' Ideas may remain when 
the expression of them is indefinitely varied. Nay, one 
cause of corruption in religion is the refusal to follow^ the 

L 



146 PiLritanism and the Church of England. 

course of doctrine as it moves on, and an obstinacy in the 
notions of the past. So our Lord found his people 
precisians in their obedience to the letter ; he condemned 
them for not being led on to its spirit, — that is, its 
development. The Gospel is the development of the 
Law ; yet what difference seems wider than that which 
separates the unbending rule of Moses from the grace and 
truth which came by Jesus Christ ? The more claim an 
idea has to be considered living, the more various will be 
its aspects \ and the more social and political is its nature, 
the more compHcated and subtle will be its developments, 
and the longer and more eventful will be its course. Such 
is Christianity.' And yet once more : ' It may be objected 
that inspired documents, such as the Holy Scriptures, at 
once determine doctrine without further trouble. But 
they were intended to create an idea., and that idea is not 
in the sacred text, but in the mind of the reader ; and the 
question is, whether that idea is communicated to him in 
its completeness and minute accuracy on its first appre- 
hension, or expands in his heart and intellect, and comes 
to perfection in the course of time. If it is said that 
inspiration supplied the place of this development in the 
first recipients of Christianity, still the time at length 
came when its recipients ceased to be inspired ; and on 
these recipients the revealed truths would fall as in other 



Puritanism and the Chnrch of England. 147 

cases, at first vaguely and generally, and would afterwards 
be completed by developments.' 

The notion thus admirably expounded of a gradual 
understanding of the Bible, a progressive development 
of Christianity, is the same which was in Bishop Butler's 
mind when he laid down in his Analogy that ' the Bible 
contains many truths as yet undiscovered.' ' And as,' 
he says, 'the whole scheme of Scripture is not yet 
understood, so, if it ever comes to be understood, before 
the restitution of all things and without miraculous 
interpositions, it must be in the same way as natural 
knowledge is come at, — by the continuance and progTess 
of learning and of liberty, and by particular persons 
attending to, comparing, and pursuing intimations scat- 
tered up and down it, which are overlooked and dis- 
regarded by the generality of the world. For this is the 
way in which all improvements are made ; by thoughtful 
men's tracing on obscure hints, as it were, dropped as 
by nature accidentally, or which seem to come into our 
minds by chance.' And again : ' Our existence is not 
only successive, as it must be of necessity, but one state 
of our life and being is appointed by God to be a prepa- 
ration for another, and that to be the means of attaining 
to another succeeding one ; infancy to childhood, child- 
hood to youth, youth to mature age. Men are impatient 

L 2 



148 Puritanism and tJie Church of England. 

and for precipitating things ; but the author of nature 
appears deUberate throughout his operations, accom- 
pHshing his natural ends by slow successive steps. Thus, 
in the daily course of natural providence, God operates 
in the very same manner as in the dispensation of 
Christianity; making one thing subservient to another, 
this to somewhat further ; and so on, through a progres- 
sive series of means which extend both backward and 
forward, beyond our utmost view. Of this manner of 
operation everything we see in the course of nature 
is as much an instance as any part of the Christian 
dispensation.' 

All this is indeed incomparably well said ; and with 
Dr. Newman we may, on the strength of it all, beyond 
any doubt, 'fairly conclude that Christian doctrine 
admits of formal, legitimate, and true developments ; ' 
that *the whole Bible is written on the principle of 
development.' 

Dr. Newman, indeed, uses this idea in a manner 
which seems to us arbitrary and condemned by the idea 
itself He uses it in support of the pretensions of the 
Church of Rome to an infallible authority on points of 
doctrine. He says, with much ingenuity, to Protestants : 
The doctrines you receive are no more on the face of 
the Bible, or in the plain teaching of the ante-Nicene 



PiLritanism and tJie CJmrch of England. 149 

Church, which alone you consider pure, than the doc- 
trines you reject. The doctrine of the Trinity is a 
development, as much as the doctrine of Purgatory. 
Both of them are developments made by the Church, 
by the post-Nicene Church. The determination of the 
Canon of Scripture, a thing of vital importance to you 
who acknowledge no authority but Scripture, is a develop- 
ment due to the post-Nicene Church. — And thus Dr. 
Newman would compel Protestants to admit that which is, 
he declares, in itself reasonable, — namely, ' the probability 
of the appointment in Christianity of an external autho- 
rity to decide upon the true developments of doctrine 
and practice in it, thereby separating them from the 
mass of mere human speculation, extravagance, corrup- 
tion, and error, in and out of which they gTow. This is 
the doctrine of the infallibility of the Church, of faith 
and obedience towards the Church, founded on the 
probability of its never erring in its declarations or 
commands.' 

Now, asserted in this absolute way, and extended to 
doctrine as well as discipline, to speculative thought as 
well as to Christian practice, Dr. Newman's conclusion 
seems at variance with his own theory of development, 
and to be something like an instance of what Bishop 
Butler criticises when he says : ' Men are impatient, 



150 Puritanism and the ChurcJi of England. 

and for precipitating things.' But Dr. Newman has 
himself suppUed us with a sort of commentary on these 
words of Butler's which is worth quoting, because it 
throws more light on our point than Butler's few 
words can throw on it by themselves. Dr. Newman 
says : ' Development is not an effect of wishing and 
resolving, or of forced enthusiasm, or of any mechanism 
of reasoning, or of any mere subtlety of intellect ; but 
comes of its own innate power of expansion within the 
mind in its season, though with the use of reflection and 
argument and original thought, more or less as it may 
happen, with a dependence on the ethical growth of the 
mind itself, and with a reflex influence upon it.' 

It is impossible to point out more sagaciously and ex- 
pressively the natural, spontaneous, free character of true 
development ; how such a development must follow laws 
of its own, may often require vast periods of time, cannot 
be hurried, cannot be stopped. And so far as Chris- 
tianity deals, — as, in its metaphysical theology, it does 
abundantly deal, — with thought and speculation, it must 
surely be admitted that for its true and ultimate develop- 
ment in this line more time is required, and other con- 
ditions have to be fulfilled, than we have had already. 
So far as Christian doctrine contains speculative philo- 
sophical ideas, never since its origin have the conditions 



Puritanisvi and the Church of England. 151 

been present for determining these adequately ; certainly 
not in the medieval Church, which so dauntlessly strove 
to determine them. And therefore on every Creed and 
Council is judgment passed in Bishop Butler's sentence : 
' The Bible contains many triLths as yet nndis covered,^ 

The Christian religion has practice for its great end 
and aim; but it raises, as anyone can see, and as 
Church-history proves, numerous and great questions of 
philosophy and of scientific criticism. Well, for the true 
elucidation of such questions, and for their final solution, 
time and favourable developing conditions are confessedly 
necessary. From the end of the apostolic age and of the 
great fontal burst of Christianity, down to the present 
time, have such conditions ever existed in the Christian 
communities, for determining adequately the questions 
of philosophy and scientific criticism which the Christian 
religion starts ? God^ creation, will, evil, propitiation, 
immortality, — these terms and many more of the same 
kind, however much they might in the Bible be used in a 
concrete and practical manner, yet plainly had in them- 
selves a provocation to abstract thought, carried with them 
the occasions of a criticism and a philosophy, which must 
sooner or later make its appearance in the Church. It 
■did make its appearance, and the question is whether it 
has ever yet appeared there under conditions favourable 



152 Picritanisni and the Church of England. 

to its true development. Surely this is best elucidated by 
considering whether questions of criticism and philosophy 
in general ever had one of their happy moments, their 
times for successful development, in the early and middle 
ages of Christendom at all, or have had one of them in 
the Christian churches, as such, since. All these questions 
hang together, and the time that is improper for solving 
one sort of them truly, is improper for solving the 
others. 

Well, surely, historic criticism, criticism of style, 
criticism of nature, no one would go to the early or 
middle ages of the Church for illumination on these 
matters. How then should those ages develop success- 
fully a philosophy of theology, or in other words, a 
criticism of physics and metaphysics, which involves the 
three other criticisms and more besides ? Church-theology 
is an elaborate attempt at a philosophy of theology, at a 
philosophical criticism. In Greece, before Christianity 
appeared, there had been a favouring period for the deve- 
lopment of such a criticism ; a considerable movement of 
it took place, and considerable results were reached. 
When Christianity began, this movement was in deca- 
dence ; it declined more and more till it died quite out ; 
it revived very slowly, and as it waxed, the mediaeval 
Church waned. The doctrine of universals is a question 



PiLritanisvi and the Church of England. 153 

of philosophy discussed in Greece, and re-discussed in the 
middle ages. Whatever light this doctrine receives from 
Plato's treatment of it, or Aristotle's, in whatever state 
they left it, will anyone say that the Nominalists and 
Realists brought any more light to it, that they developed 
it in any way, or could develop it ? For the same reason^ 
St. Augustine's criticism of God's eternal decrees, original 
sin, and justification, the criticism of St. Thomas Aquinas 
on them, the decisions of the Church on them, are of 
necessity, and from the very nature of things, inadequate, 
because, being philosophical developments, they are 
made in an age when the forces for true philosophical 
development are waning or wanting. 

So when Hooker says most truly : ' Our belief in the 
Trinity, the co-eternity of the Son of God with his Father, 
the proceeding of the Spirit from the Father and the Son, 
with other principal points the necessity whereof is by 
none denied, are notwithstanding in Scripture nowhere to 
be found by express literal mention, only deduced they 
are out of Scripture by collection ;' — when Hooker thus 
points out, what is undoubtedly the truth, that these 
Church-doctrines are developments, we may add this 
other tmth equally undoubted,— that being philosophical 
developments, they are developments of a kind which 
the Church has never yet had the right conditions for 



154 Puritanism and the Chnrch of England. 

making adequately, any more than it has had the conditions 
for developing out of what is said in the Book of Genesis 
a true philosophy of nature, or out of what is said in the 
Book of Daniel, a true philosophy of history. It matters 
nothing whether the scientific truth was there, and the 
problem was to extract it ; or not there, and the problem 
was to understand why it was not there, and the relation 
borne by what was there to the scientific truth. The 
Church had no means of solving either the one problem 
or the other. And this from no fault at all of the Church, 
but for the same reason that she was unfitted to solve a 
difficulty in Aristotle's Physics or Plato's Timmus, and to 
determine the historical value of Herodotus or Livy; 
simply from the natural operation of the law of develop- 
ment, which for success in philosophy and criticism 
requires certain conditions, which in the early and me- 
diaeval Church were not to be found. 

And when the movement of philosophy and criticism 
came with the Renascence, this movement was almost 
entirely outside the Churches, whether CathoHc or 
Protestant, and not inside them. It worked in men like 
Descartes and Bacon, and not in men like Luther and 
Calvin; so that the doctrine of these two eminent 
personages, Luther and Calvin, so far as it was a 
philosophical and critical development from Scripture, 



I 



PiLritanisin and the Church of England. 155 

had no more likelihood of being an adequate development 
than the doctrine of the Council of Trent. And so it has 
gone on to this day. Philosophy and criticism have 
become a great power in the world, and inevitably tend 
to alter and develop Church-doctrine, so far as this 
doctrine is, as to a great extent it is, philosophical and 
critical. Yet the seat of the developing force is not in 
the Church itself, but elsewhere ; its influences filter 
strugglingly into the Church, and the Church slowly 
absorbs and incorporates them. And whatever hinders 
their filtering in and becoming incorporated, hinders truth 
and the natural progress of things. 

While, therefore, we entirely agree with Dr. Newman 
and with the great Anglican divines that the whole Bible 
is written on the principle of development, and that 
Christianity in its doctrine and discipfine is and must be 
a development of the Bible, we yet cannot agree that for 
the adequate development of Christian doctrine, so far as 
theology exhibits this metaphysically and scientifically, 
the Church, whether ante-Nicene or post-Nicene, has 
ever yet furnished a channel. Thought and science 
follow their own law of development, they are slowly 
elaborated in the growth and forward pressure of humanity, 
in what Shakspeare calls, — 



the prophetic soul 
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come ; 



156 Pttritaiiism and the Chitrcli of England, 

and their ripeness and unripeness, as Dr. Newman most 
truly says, are not an effect of our wishing or resolving. 
Rather do they seem brought about by a power such as 
Goethe figures by the Zcit-Geist or Time-Spirit, and St. 
Paul describes as a divine power revealing additions ta 
what we possess already. 

But sects of men are apt to be shut up in sectarian 
ideas of their own, and to be less open to new general 
ideas than the main body of men ; therefore St. Paul in 
the same breath exhorts to unity. What may justly be 
conceded to the Catholic Church is, that in her idea of a 
continuous developing power in united Christendom to 
work upon the data furnished by the Bible, and produce 
new combinations from them as the growth of time re- 
quired it, she followed a true instinct. But the right 
philosophical developments she vainly imagined herself 
to have had the power to produce, and her attempts 
in this direction were at most but a prophecy of this 
power, as alchemy is said to have been a prophecy of 
chemistry. 

With developments of discipline and church -order it 
is very different. The Bible raises, as we have seen, 
many and great questions of philosophy and criticism ; 
still, essentially the Church was not a corporation for 
speculative purposes, but a corporation for purposes of 



\ 



Puritanism and tJie Church of England. 157 

moral growth and of practice. Terms like God, creation^ 
will, evil, propiiiation, immortality, evoke, as we have 
said, and must evoke, sooner or later, a philosophy ; but 
to evoke this was the accident and not the essence of 
Christianity. What, then, was the essence ? 

An ingenious writer, as unHke Dr. Newman as it is 
possible to conceive, has lately told us. In an article in 
Fraser's Magazine, — an article written with great vigour 
and acuteness, — this writer advises us to return to Paley, 
whom we were beginning to neglect, because the real im- 
portant essence of Christianity, or rather, to quote quite 
literally, ' the only form of Christianity which is worthy 
of the serious consideration of rational men, is Protes- 
tantism as stated by Paley and his school.' And why? 
'• Because this Protestantism enables the saint to prove to 
the worldly man that Christ threatened him with hell-fire, 
and proved his power to threaten by rising from the dead 
and ascending into heaven \ and these allegations are 
the fimdanwital assertions of Christianity.^ 

Now it may be said that this is a somewhat con- 
tracted view of ' the unsearchable riches of Christ ; ' but 
we will not quarrel with it. And this for several reasons. 
In the first place, it is the view often taken by popular 
theology. In the second place, it is the view best fitted 
to serve its Benthamite author's object, which is to get 



158 Piiriianism and the Church of England. 

Christianity out of the way altogether. In the third 
place, its shortness gives us courage to try and do what 
is the hardest thing in the world, namely, to pack a state- 
ment of the main drift of Christianity into a few lines of 
nearly as short compass. 

What then was, in brief, the Christian gospel, or 
* good news ' ? It was this : The kingdom of God is come 
unto you. The power of Jesus upon the multitudes who 
heard him gladly, was not that by rising from the dead 
and ascending into heaven he enabled the saint to prove 
to the worldly man the certainty of hell-fire (for he had 
not yet done so) ; but that he talked to them about the 
kingdom of God.^ And what is the kingdom of God or 

' Nothing can be more certain than that the kingdom of God 
meant originally, and was understood to mean, a Messianic king- 
dom speedily to be revealed ; and that to this idea of the kingdom 
is due much of the effect which its preaching exercised on the imagi- 
nation of the first generation of Christians. But nothing is more 
certain, also, than that while the end itself, the Messianic kingdom, 
was necessarily something intangible and future, the way to the end, 
the doing the will of God by intently following the voice of the moral 
conscience, in those duties, above all, for which there was then in the 
world the most crying need, — the duties of humbleness, self-denial, 
pureness, justice, charity, — became from the very first in the teaching 
of Jesus something so ever-present and practical, and so associated 
with the essence of Jesus himself, that the wayXo the kingdom grew 
inseparable, in thought, from the kingdom itself, and was bathed in 
the same light and charm. Then, after a time, as the vision of an 



Puritanism and the Church of England. 159 

kingdom of heaven ? It is this : God's will dojte, as in 
heaven so on earth. And how was this come to mankind? 
Because Jesus is coine to save his people fi'om their sins. 
And what is being saved from our sins ? This : Entering 
into the kingdom of heaven by doing the will of our Father 
which is in heaven. And how does Christ enable us to do 
this ? By teaching us to take his yoke upon tis, and learn 
of him to deny ourselves and take tip our cross daily and 
follow him., and to lose our life for the purpose of saving it. 
So that St. Paul might say most truly that the seal of the 
sure foundation of God in Christianity was this : Let 
every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from in- 
iquity : or, as he elsewhere expands it : Let him bring 
foi^h the fruits of the Spirit, — love, Joy, peace, longsuffei'ingy 
kindness, goodness, faith, mildness, self-control. ^ 

On this foundation arose the Christian Church, and 
not on any foundation of speculative metaphysics. It was 
inevitable that the speculative metaphysics should come, 
but they were not the foundation. When they came, the 
danger of the Christian Church was that she should take 
them for the foundation. The people who were built on 

approaching Messianic kingdom Avas dissipated, the idea of the 
perfect accomplishment on eartli of the will of God had to take the 
room of it, and in its own realisation to place the ideal of the true 
kingdom of God. 

1 II Tim., ii, 19 ; Gal., v, 22, 23. 



i6o PiLritanisin and the CImrch of England. 

the real foundation, who were united in the joy of Christ's 
good news, naturally, as they came to know of one 
another's existence, as their relations with one another 
multiplied, as the sense of sympathy in the possession of 
a common treasure deepened, — naturally, I say, drew 
together in one body, with an organisation growing out 
of the needs of a growing body. It is quite clear that 
the more strongly Christians felt their common business 
in setting forward upon earth, through Christ's spirit, the 
kingdom of God, the more they would be drawn to 
coalesce into one society for this business, with the 
natural and true notion that the acting together in this 
way offers to men greater helps for reaching their aim, 
presents fewer distractions, and above all, supplies a 
more animating force of sympathy and mutual assurance, 
than the acting separately. Only the sense of differences 
greater than the sense of sympathy could defeat this 
tendency. 

Dr. Newman has told us what an impression was 
once made upon his mind by the sentence : Securus 
judicat orbis terrariim. We have shown how, for matters 
of philosophical judgment, not yet settled but requiring 
development to dear them, the consent of the world, at 
a time when this clearing development cannot have 
happened, seems to carry little or no weight at all ; 



Puritanism and the Church of England. i6i 

indeed, as to judgment on these points, we should rather 
be indined to lay down the very contrary of Dr. Newman's 
affirmation, and to say : Secitriis delirat orhis terrarum. 
But points of speculative theology being out of the 
question, and the practical ground and purpose of man's 
religion being broadly and plainly fixed, we should be 
quite disposed to concede to Dr. Newman, that securus 
colit orbis terrarum ; — those pursue this purpose best who 
pursue it together. For unless prevented by extraneous 
causes, they manifestly tend, as the history of the 
Church's growth shows, to pursue it together. 

Nonconformists are fond of talking of the unity which 
may co-exist with separation, and they say : '■ There are 
four evangelists, yet one gospel ; why should there not be 
many separate religious bodies, yet one Church?' But 
their theory of unity in separation is a theory palpably 
invented to cover existing facts, and their argument from 
the evangelists is a paralogism. For the Four Gospels 
arose out of no thought of divergency ; they were not 
designed as corrections of one prior gospel, or of one 
another ; they were concurring testimonies borne to the 
same fact. But the several religious bodies of Christendom 
plainly grew out of an intention of divergency ; clearly 
they were designed to correct the imperfections of one 
prior church and of each other ; and to say of things 

M 



1 62 Puritanism and the Church of England. 

sprung out of discord that they may make one, because 
things sprung out of concord may make one, is Hke 
saying that because several agreements may make a 
peace, therefore several wars may make a peace too. 
No ; without some strong motive to the contrary, men 
united by the pursuit of a clearly defined common aim 
of irresistible attractiveness naturally coalesce ; and since 
they coalesce naturally, they are clearly right in coalescing 
and find their advantage in it. 

All that Dr. Newman has so excellently said about 
development applies here legitimately and fully. Existence 
justifies additions and stages in existence. The living 
edifice planted on the foundation, Let every one that 
nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity, could not 
but grow, if it lived at all. If it grew, it could not but 
make developments, and all developments not incon- 
sistent with the aim of its original foundation, and not 
extending beyond the moral and practical sphere which 
was the sphere of its original foundation, are legitimated 
by the very fact of the Church having in the natural 
evolution of its life and growth made them. A boy does 
not wear the clothes or follow the ways of an infant, nor 
a man those of a boy ; yet they are all engaged in the 
one same business of developing their growing life, and 
to the clothes to be worn and the ways to be followed for 



Pitritanism and the CJmrch of England. 163 

the purpose of doing this, nature will, in general, direct 
them safely. The several scattered congregations of the 
first age of Christianity coalesced into one community, 
just as the several scattered Christians had earlier still 
coalesced into congregations. Why ? — because such was 
the natural course of things. It had nothing inconsistent 
with the fundamental ground of Christians, Let every one 
that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity \ and 
it was approved by their growing and enlarging in it. They 
developed a church-discipline with a hierarchy of bishops 
and archbishops, which was not that of the first times ; 
they developed church-usages, such as the practice of 
infant baptism, which were not those of the first times ; 
they developed a church-ritual with ceremonies which 
were not those of the first times j — they developed all 
these, just as they developed a church-architecture which 
was not that of the first times, because they were no 
longer in the first times, and required for their expanding 
growth what suited their own times. They coalesced 
with the State because they grew by doing so. They 
called the faith they possessed in common the Catholic^ 
that is, the general or universal faith. They developed, 
also, as we have seen, dogma or a theological philosophy. 
Both dogma and discipline became a part of the Catholic 
faith, or profession of the general body of Christians. 

M 2 



164 Pttritanism and the CJmrch of England. 

Now to develop a discipline, or form of outward life 
for itself, the Church, as has been said, had necessarily, 
like every other living thing, the requisite qualifica- 
tions; to develop scientific dogma it had not. But 
even of the dogma which the Church developed it 
may be said, that, from the very nature of things, it 
was probably, as compared with the opposing dogma 
over which it prevailed, the more suited to the actual 
condition of the Church's life, and to the due progress 
of the divine work for which she existed. For instance, 
whatever may be scientifically the rights of the question 
about grace and free-will, it is evident that, for the 
Church of the fifth century, Pelagianism was the less 
inspiring and edifying doctrine, and the sense of being in 
the divine hand was the feeling which it was good for 
Christians to be filled with. Whatever may be scientifi- 
cally the merits of the dispute between Arius and 
Athanasius, for the Church of their time whatever most 
exalted or seemed to exalt Jesus Christ was clearly the 
profitable doctrine, the doctrine most helpful to that 
moral life which was the true life of the Church. 

People, however, there were in abundance who 
differed on points both of discipline and of dogma from 
the rule which obtained in the Church, and who sepa- 
rated from her on account of that difference. These 



Puritanism and the ChiLrch of England. 165 

were the heretics : separatists, as the name impHes, for 
the sake of opinions. And the very name, therefore, 
impHes that they were wrong in separating, and that the 
body which held together was right ; because the Church 
exists, not for the sake of opinions, but for the sake of 
moral practice, and a united endeavour after this is 
stronger than a broken one. Valentinians, Marcionites, 
Montanists, Donatists, Manichseans, Novatians, Euty- 
chians, Apollinarians, Nestorians, Arians, Pelagians, — if 
they separated on points of discipline they were wrong, be- 
cause for developing its own fit outward conditions of life 
the body of a community has, as we have seen, a real 
natural power, and individuals are bound to sacrifice their 
fancies to it ; if they separated on points of dogma they 
were ^^Tong also, because, while neither they nor the 
Church had the means of determining such points ade- 
quately, the true instinct lay in those who, instead of 
separating for such points, conceded them as the Church 
settled them, and found their bond of union, where it in 
truth really was, not in notions about the co- eternity of 
the Son, but in the principle : Let every one that nametJi 
the name of Christ depart from iniquity . 

Does any one imagine that all the Church shared 
Augustine's speculative opinions about grace and pre- 
destination ? that many members of it did not rather 



1 66 PiLvitanisin and the Church of England, 

incline, as a matter of speculative opinion, to the notions 
of Pelagius ? Does any one imagine that all who stood 
with the Church and did not join themselves to the 
Arians, were speculatively Athanasians ? It was not so ; 
but they had a true feeling for what purpose the Gospel 
and the Church were given them, and for what they were 
not given them ; they could see that ' impious and pious 
living/ according to that sentence of Epiphanius we have 
quoted from Hammond, ' divided the whole Christian 
world into erroneous and orthodox ; ' and that it was not 
worth while to suffer themselves to be divided for any- 
thing else. 

And though it will be said that separatists for 
opinions on points of discipline and dogma have often 
asserted, and sometimes believed, that piety and im- 
piety were vitally concerned in these points ; yet here 
again the true religious instinct is that which discerns, 
— w^hat is seldom so very obscure, — whether they are 
in truth thus vitally concerned or not ; and, if they are 
not, cannot be perverted into fancying them concerned 
and breaking unity for them. This, I say, is the true 
religious instinct, the instinct which most clearly seizes 
the essence and aim of the Christian Gospel and of 
the Christian Church. But fidelity to it leaves, also, 
the way least closed to the admission of true develop- 



PtLvitanis'in and the Church of England. \6y 

merits of speculative thought, when the time is come for 
them, and to the incorporation of these true developments 
with the ideas and practice of Christians. 

Is there not, then, any separation which is right and 
reasonable ? Yes, separation on plain points of morals. 
For these involve the very essence of the Christian Gospel, 
and the very ground on which the Christian Church is 
built. The sale of indulgences, if deliberately instituted 
and persisted in by the main body of the Church, 
afforded a valid reason for breaking unity ; the doctrine 
of purgatory, or of the real presence, did not 

However, a cosmopolitan church-order, commenced 
when the political organisation of Christians was also cos- 
mopolitan, — when, that is, the nations of Europe were 
politically one in the unity of the Roman Empire, — might 
well occasion difficulties as the nations solidified into 
independent states with a keen sense of their indepen- 
dent life j so that, the cosmopolitan type disappearing 
for civil affairs, and being replaced by the national type, 
the same disappearance and replacement tended to 
prevail in ecclesiastical affairs also. But this was a 
political difficulty, not a religious one, and it raised no 
insuperable bar to continued religious union. A Church 
with Anglican liberties might very well, the English 
national spirit being what it is, have been in religious 



1 68 Pttritanism and the Chi trek of England. 

communion with Rome, and yet have been safely trusted 
to maintain and develop its national liberties to any 
extent required. 

The moral corruptions of Rome, on the other hand, 
were a real ground for separation. On their account,, 
and solely on their account, if they could not be got rid 
of, was separation not only la^vful but necessary. It has 
always been the averment of the Church of England, 
that the change made in her at the Reformation was the 
very least change which was absolutely necessary. No 
doubt she used the opportunity of her breach with Rome 
to get rid of several doctrines which the human mind had 
outgrown ; but it was the immoral practice of Rome that 
really moved her to separation. And she maintained 
that she merely got rid of Roman corruptions which were 
immoral and intolerable, and remained the old, historic, 
Catholic Church of England still. 

The right to this title of Catholic is a favourite- 
matter of contention between bodies of Christians. But 
let us use names in their customary and natural senses. 
To us it seems that unless one chooses to fight about 
words, and fancifully to put into the word Catholic some 
occult quality, one must allow that the changes made in 
the Church of England at the Reformation impaired its 
Catholicity. The word Catholic was meant to describe 



t 



Puritanism mid the Church of England. 1 69 

the common or general profession and worship of Christ- 
endom at the time when the word arose. Undoubtedly 
this general profession and worship had not a strict 
uniformity everywhere, but it had a clearly-marked 
common character ; and this well-known type Bede, or 
Anselm, or Wiclif himself, would to this day easily re- 
cognise in a Roman Catholic religious service, but 
hardly in an Anglican ; while, on the other hand, in a 
Roman Catholic religious service an ordinary Anglican 
finds himself as much in a strange world and out of his 
usual course, as in a Nonconformist meeting-house. 
Something precious was no doubt lost in losing this 
common profession and worship ; but the loss was, as we 
Protestants maintain, incurred for the sake of something 
yet more precious still, — the purity of that moral practice 
which was the very cause for which the common pro- 
fession and worship existed. Now, it seems captious to 
incur voluntarily a loss for a great and worthy object, 
and at the same time, by a conjuring with words, to try 
and make it appear that we have not suffered the loss 
at all. So on the word Catholic we will not insist too 
jealously ; but thus much, at any rate, must be allowed 
to the Church of England, — that she kept enough of the 
past to preserve, as far as this nation was concerned, her 



I/O Puritanism and the CJmrch of England. 

continuity, to be still the historic Church of England; 
and that she avoided the error, to which there was so 
much to draw her, and into which all the other reformed 
Churches fell, of making improved speculative doctrinal 
opinions the main ground of her separation. 

A Nonconformist newspaper, it is true, reproaching 
the Church with what is, in our opinion, her greatest 
praise, namely, that on points of doctrinal theology she is 
' a Church that does not know her own mind,' roundly 
asserts, as we have already mentioned, that ' no man in 
his senses can deny that the Church of England was 
meant to be a thoroughly Protestant and Evangelical, 
and it may be said Calvinistic Church.' But not only 
does the whole course of Church-history disprove such 
an assertion, and show that this is what the Puritans 
always wanted to make the Church, and what the 
Church would never be made, but we can disprove it, 
too, out of the mouths of the very Puritans them- 
selves. At the Savoy Conference the Puritans urged 
that ' our first reformers out of their great wisdom did at 
that time (of the Reformation) so compose the Liturgy, 
as to win upon the Papists, and to draw them into their 
Church communion I)y varyi7ig as little as they coiddfrom 
the Romish forms befo7r in iLse ; ' and this they alleged as 
their great plea for purging the Liturgy. And the 



PiLritanisni and tJie CJmrcJi of England. 171 

Bishops resisted, and upheld the proceeding of the re- 
formers as the essential policy of the Church of England ; 
as indeed it was, and till this day has continued to be. 
No j the Church of England did not give her energies to 
inventing a new church-order for herself and fighting for 
it j to singling out two or three speculative dogmas as 
the essence of Christianity, and fighting for them. She 
set herself to carry forward, and as much as possible on 
the old lines, the old practical work and proper design of 
the Christian Church ; and this is what left her mind 
comparatively open, as we have seen, for the admission 
of philosophy and criticism, as they slowly developed 
themselves outside the Church and filtered into her; an 
admission which confessedly proves just now of capital 
importance. 

This openness of mind the Puritans have not shared 
with the Church, and how shoidd they have shared it? 
They are founded on the negation of that idea of deve- 
lopment which plays so important a part in the life of the 
Church ; on the assumption that there is a divinely 
appointed church-order fixed once for all in the Bible, 
and that they have adopted it ; that there is a doctrinal 
scheme of faith, justification, and imputed righteousness, 
which is the test of a standing or falling church and the 
essence of the gospel, and that they have extracted it. 



172 Puritanism and the Church of England. 

These are assumptions which, as they make union im- 
possible, so also make growth impossible. The Church 
makes church-order a matter of ecclesiastical constitution, 
is founded on moral practice, and though she develops 
speculative dogma, does not allow that this or that ^ 
dogma is the essence of Christianity. 

* Congregational Nonconformists,' say the Indepen- 
dents, ' can never be incorporated into an organic union 
with Anglican Episcopacy, because there is not even the 
shadow of an outline of it in the New Testament, and it 
is our assertion and profound belief that Christ and the 
Apostles have given us all the laws that are necessary for 
the constitution and government of the Church.' ^ 
' Whatever may come,' says the President of the Wes- 
leyan Conference, 'we are determined to be simple, 
earnest preachers of the gospel. Whatever may come, we 
are determined to be true to Scriptural Protestantism. 
We would be friendly with all evangeHcal churches, but 
we will have no fellowship with the man of sin. We will 
give up life itself rather than be unfaithful to the truth. 
It is ours to cry everywhere : " Come, sinners, to the 
gospel-feast ! " ' And this gospel, this Scriptural Protes- 
tantism, this truth, is the doctrine of justification by 

1 Address of the Rev. G. W. Conder at Liverpool, in the 
I.ancashi7-e Congregational Calendar for 1 869-70. 



Pttritanism and the ChiLrch of England. 173 

' pleading solely the blood of the covenant,' of which we 
have said so much. Methodists cannot unite with a 
church which does not found itself on this doctrine of 
justification, but which holds the doctrine of priestly 
absolution, of the real presence, and other doctrines of 
like stamp; CongregationaHsts cannot unite with a 
church which, besides not resting on the doctrine of jus- 
tification, has a church-order not prescribed in the New 
Testament. 

Now as Hooker truly says of those who '■ desire to 
draw all things unto the determination of bare and naked 
Scripture,' as Dr. Newman, too, has said, and as many 
others have said, the Bible does not exhibit, drawn out in 
black and white, the precise tenets and usages of any 
Christian society ; some inference and criticism must be 
employed to get at them. ' For the most part, even such 
as are readiest to cite for one thing five hundred sentences 
of Scripture, what warrant have they that any one of 
them doth mean the thing for which it is alleged?' 
Nay, ' it is not the word of God itself which doth, or 
possibly can, assure us that we do well to think it his 
word.' So says Hooker, and what he says is perfectly 
true. A process of reasoning and collection is necessary 
to get at the Scriptural church-discipline and the 
Scriptural Protestantism of the Puritans; in short, this 



174 Puritanism and the Church of England. 

discipline and this doctrine are developments. And the 
first is an unsound development, in a line where there 
was a power of making a true development, and where 
the Church made it ; the second is an unsound develop- 
ment in a line where neither the Church nor Puritanism 
had the power of making true developments. But as it 
is the truth of its Scriptural Protestantism which in 
Puritanism's eyes especially proves the truth of its 
Scriptural church-order which has this Protestantism, and 
the falsehood of the Anglican church-order which has 
much less of it, to abate the confidence of the Puritans 
in their Scriptural Protestantism is the first step towards 
their union, so much to be desired, with the national 
Church. 

We say, therefore, that the doctrine : ' It is agreed be- 
tween God and the mediator Jesus Christ the Son <of God, 
surety for the redeemed, as parties-contractors, that the 
sins of the redeemed should be imputed to innocent Christ, 
and he both condemned and put to death for them upon 
this very condition, that whosoever heartily consents unto 
the covenant of reconciliation offered through Christ shall, 
by the imputation of his obedience unto them, be justified 
and holden righteous before God,' — we say that this doc- 
trine is as much a human development from the text, 'Christ 
Jesus came into the world to save sinners,' as the doctrine 



Puritanism and the Chitrch of England. 175 

of priestly absolution is a human development from the 
text, ' Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto 
them/ or the doctrine of the real presence from the text^ 
'Take, eat, this is my body.' In our treatise on St. Paul 
we have shown at length that the received doctrine of 
justification is an unsound development. It may be said 
that the doctrine of priestly absolution and of the real pre- 
sence are unsound developments also. True, in our 
opinion they are so ; they are, like the doctrine of justifi- 
cation, developments made under conditions which pre- 
cluded the possibility of sound developments in this 
line. But the difference is here : the Church of England 
does not identify Christianity with these unsound deve- 
lopments ; she does not call either of them Scriptural 
Protestantism, or truth, or the gospel ; she does not insist 
that all who are in communion with her should hold them ; 
she does not repel from her communion those who hold 
doctrines at variance with them. She treats them as she 
does the received doctrine of justification, to which she 
does not tie herself up, but leaves people to hold it if they 
please. She thus provides room for growth and further 
change in these very doctrines themselves. But to the 
doctrine of justification Puritanism ties itself up, just as 
it tied itself up formerly to the doctrine of predestination ; 
it calls it Scriptural Protestantism, truths the gospel \ it will 



1/6 Puritanism and the CJmrch of England. 

have communion with none who do not hold it ; it 
repels communion with any who hold the doctrines of 
priestly absolution and the real presence, because they 
seem to interfere with it. Yet it is really itself no better 
than they. But how can growth possibly, find place in this 
doctrine, while it is held in such a fashion ? 

Every one who perceives and values the power con- 
tained in Christianity, must be struck to see how, at the 
present moment, the progress of this power seems to de- 
pend upon its being able to disengage itself from specula- 
tive accretions that encumber it. A considerable move- 
ment to this end is visible in the Church of England. The 
most nakedly speculative, and therefore the most inevita- 
bly defective, parts of the Prayer Book, — the Athanasian 
Creed and the Thirty-nine Articles, — our generation will 
not improbably see the Prayer Book rid of. But the 
larger the body in which this movement works, the greater 
is the power of the movement. If the Church of England 
were disestablished to-day it would be desirable to 
re-establish her to-morrow, if only because of the immense 
power for development which a national body possesses. 
It is because we know something of the Nonconformist 
ministers, and what eminent force and faculty many of 
them have for contributing to the work of develop- 
ment now before the Church, that we cannot bear to see 



Puritanism and the CJmrch of England. I'jy 

the waste of power caused by their separatism and bat- 
tHng with the Estabhshment, ^yhich absorb their energies 
too much to suffer them to carry forward the work of 
development themselves, and cut them off from aiding 
those in the Church who carry it forward. 

The political dissent of the Nonconformists, based on 
their condemnation of the Anglican church-order as un- 
scriptural, is just one of those speculative accretions which 
we have spoken of as encumbering religion. Politics are 
a good thing, and religion is a good thing ; but they make 
a fractious mixture. 'The Nonconformity of England, 
and the Nonconformity alone, has been the salvation of 
England from Papal tyranny and kingly misrule and 
despotism. ' ^ This is the favourite boast, the familiar 
strain ; but this is really politics, and not religion at all. 
But righteousness is religion ; and the Nonconformists 
say : ' Who have done so much for righteousness as 
we ? ' For as much righteousness as will go with politics, 
no one ; for the sterner virtues, for the virtues of the 
Jews of the Old Testament ; but these are only half of 
righteousness and not the essentially Christian half. We 
have seen how St. Paul tore himself in two, rent his life 
in the middle and began it again, because he was so dis- 
satisfied with a righteousness which was, after all, in its 

^ The Rev. G. W. Conder, icbi siip-a. 
N 



178 Puritanism and the CJmrch of England. 

main features, Puritan. And surely it can hardly be 
denied that the more eminently and exactly Christian 
type of righteousness is the type exhibited by Church 
worthies like Herbert, Ken, and Wilson, rather than that 
exhibited by the worthies of Puritanism ; the cause being 
that these last mixed politics with religion so much more 
than did the first. 

Paul, too, be it remembered, condemned disunion in 
the society of Christians as much as he declined politics. 
This does not, we freely own, make against the Puritans' 
refusal to take the law from their adversaries, but it does 
make against their allegation that it does not matter 
whether the society of Christians is united or not, and 
that there are even great advantages in separatism. If 
Anglicans maintained that their church-order was written 
in Scripture and a matter of divine command, then, 
Congregationalists maintaining the same thing, to the 
controversy between them there could be no end. But 
now, Anglicans maintaining no such thing, but that their 
church-order is a matter of historic development and 
natural expediency, that it has grow7t, — which is evident 
enough, — and that the essence of Christianity is in no- 
wise concerned with such matters, why should not the 
Nonconformists adopt this moderate view of the case, 
which constrains them to no admission of inferiority, but 



Puritanism and the CJmrch of England. 1 79 

only to the Renouncing an imagined divine superiority 
and to the recognition of an existing fact, and allow 
Church bishops as a development of Catholic antiquity, 
just as they have allowed Church music and Church 
architecture, which are developments of the same ? Then 
might there arise a mighty and undistracted power of 
joint life, which would transform, indeed, the doctrines 
of priestly absolution and the real presence, but which 
would transform, equally, the so-called Scriptural P^'o- 
testantism of imputed righteousness, and which would do 
more for real righteousness and for Christianity than has 
ever been done yet. 

Tillotson's proposals for comprehension, drawn up in 
1689, cannot be too much studied at the present juncture. 
These proposals, with which his name and that of Stilling- 
fleet, two of the most estimable names in the English 
Church, are specially associated, humiliate no one, refute 
no one ; they take the basis of existing facts, and en- 
deavour to build on it a solid union. They are worth 
quoting entire, and I conclude with them. Their de- 
tails our present circumstances would modify ; their spirit 
any sound plan of Church-reform must take as its rule. 

' I. That the ceremonies enjoined or recommended 
in the Liturgy or Canons be left indifferent. 

' 2. That the Liturgy be carefully reviewed, and such 



1 80 Pttritmiism and the CJmrch of England. 

alterations and changes be therein made as may supply 
the defects and remove as much as possible all ground 
of exception to any part of it, by leaving out the apocry- 
phal lessons and correcting the translation of the psalms 
used in the public service where there is need of it, and 
in many other particulars. 

' 3. That instead of all former declarations and sub- 
scriptions to be made by ministers, it shall be sufficient 
for them that are admitted to the exercise of their 
ministry in the Church of England to subscribe one 
general declaration and promise to this purpose, viz. : 
That we do suhnit to the doctrine^ discipline^ and woi'ship 
of the CJmrch of England as it shall he established by law, 
and p7'omise to teach and practisQ accordingly. 

' 4. That a new body of ecclesiastical Canons be 
made, particularly with a regard to a more effectual pro- 
vision for the reformation of manners both in ministers 
and people. 

' 5. That there be an effectual regulation of ecclesiasti- 
cal courts to remedy the great abuses and inconveniences 
which by degrees and length of time have crept into 
them ; and particularly that the power of excommunica- 
tion be taken out of the hands of lay officers and placed 
in the bishop, and not to be exercised for trivial matters, 
but upon great and weighty occasions. 



Puritanis7n and the CImrch of England. 1 8 1 

'6. That for the future those who have been or- 
dained in any of the foreign churches be not required 
to be re-ordained here, to render them capable of pre- 
ferment in the Church. 

' 7. That for the future none be capable of any- 
ecclesiastical benefice or preferment in the Church of 
England that shall be ordained in England otherwise 
than by bishops ; and that those who have been ordained 
only by presbyters shall not be compelled to renounce 
their former ordination. But because many have and do 
still doubt of the validity of such ordination, where epis- 
copal ordination may be had, and is by law required, 
it shall be sufficient for such persons to receive ordination 
from a bishop in this or the like form : "If thou art not 
already ordained, I ordain thee," &c. ; as in case a doubt 
be made of any one's baptism, it is appointed by the 
Liturgy that he be baptized in this form : " If thou art not 
baptized, I baptize thee." ' 

These are proposals ' to be made by the Church of 
England for the union of Pi'otestaiits' Who cannot see 
that the power of joint life already spoken of would be 
far greater and stronger if it comprehended Roman 
CathoHcs too. And who cannot see, also, that in the 
churches of the most strong and living Roman Catholic 
countries, — in France and Germany, — a movement is in 



1 82 PiLvitanism and the Church of England, 

progress which may one day make a general union of 
Christendom possible ? But this will not be in our day, 
nor is it business which the England of this generation is 
set to do. What may be done in our day, what our 
generation has the call and the means, if only it has the 
resolution, to bring about, is the union of Protestants. 
But this union will never be on the basis of the actual 
Scriptural Protestantism of our Puritans \ and because, so 
long as they take this for the gospel or good news of 
Christ, they cannot possibly unite on any other basis, the 
first step towards union is showing them that this is not 
the gospel. If we have succeeded in doing even so much 
towards union as to convince one of them of this, we 
have not ™tten in vain. 



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